Big bird to Hong Kong

Tuesday 19 November

As Scotty would say, you couldn’t make it up. I’d never been so organised for a trip. All my packing was done yesterday and today was just the finishing touches, ready to leave the house at 3.30 for a 6.30 p.m. flight. I made some lunch at about 1.30, during the making of which the radio momentarily went off and came back on again. Odd, I thought; but gave it no more attention. Lunch over, I started on the final, final tasks – starting with putting out the rubbish.

Opening the front door, the alarm gave an unexpected chirp. I keyed in my usual number. Absolutely no effect. I keyed in the second number – likewise.

In a trice my brilliantly organised departure collapsed in front of me to be replaced by alternating visions of the alarm going off randomly in my absence, burglars gallivanting through the house, one missed flight to Hong Kong; and so on.

To cut a long story short, I phoned the alarm company and their engineer was able to come round within the hour. It turned out the backup battery had become disconnected when he serviced it last week (!) and the spike in the mains power had wiped the memory of the alarm’s computer so that stored numbers had been wiped and the bleep on opening the door had been activated.

So by 3.50 we were back on track. And, adopting the glass half full posture, I thought how extremely lucky it was that the spike had occurred while I was still in the house to draw attention to the disconnected battery rather than it perhaps causing problems while I was away.

So now we fast forward to the present, as I sit consuming a very pleasant British Airways meal on the enormous airbus A380 before getting an extremely late night by Hong Kong time or fairly early one by UK time. My mind is quite full of all the pieces of the jigsaw of my trip that need to be nailed down, not the least of which is all the travel in China and the Chinese visa but I am faithful in the power of ‘can do’ in HK and will leg it on arrival to the travel service tomorrow afternoon.

It’s strange. Yesterday I had felt undiluted excitement at the whole trip but today I felt a bit apprehensive – and that was before the alarm went into mutiny mode. But the moment I got on the plane – or even the train to the plane I was looking forward and that’s how I feel right now.

So enough. I’ll have my main course, watch a bit of Blue Jasmine or read a bit of Don Quixote wind my watch forward eight hours to Hong Kong time and get some kip.