Honorary Shift at Terminal 5

Students have a tough time these days. Term time is packed full of unreasonable deadlines, 9-5 lectures in dark, sweaty rooms and of course...exams. But then there are the holidays, accounting for about 6 months of the year. It is the paradox of being a student - you spend all year looking forward to these holidays, you almost can't think of anything else - but after 3 days of doing absolutely nothing but clicking the refresh button on your facebook homepage the boredom begins to get painful (I was close to tears when I was forced to watch Richard and Judy through shear boredom).

So yesterday I was determined not to become the shivvering wreck of a man I was the day before. It started well. I woke up 20 minutes late and jumped into my car to pick my mate J up at 800 hours to go to the gym and pump some iron. Unfortunately I had to retire early after only 2 sets with an acute bout of unstable angina. I'm not a lazy person but it bloody hurt!

When driving J home he reminded me of a drunken proposition I made to him two nights before. To beat the boredom we both cam up with the idea that I should join him at one of his shifts at T5 Heathrow - He works on the floor landside so I could just hang around with him, pretend I was a clueless passenger (they all are!) and probably have a couple of pints in the pub behind the check in desks.

Weird! That is what I thought, but a once in a lifetime oppurtunity and would provide material for a half decent blog at the very least.

So there I was, standing in the middle of T5 with J sporadically pointing towards signs to make it look like I was lost and he was helping. The first 1-2 hours of my honorary shift went well. J had a good "task" so we just stood around the Self Check-In desks looking at how many Wu's, Chan's and Wong's were on the flight to Hong Kong and if we knew any celebs on the first class flight to LA.

China may be a super-power about to take over the world but the country has no imagination when it comes surnames...15 Wu's and 18 Wong's and too many Chan's to count...all on the same flight!

As for first class, Josh Hartnett was due to check in in about 15 minutes...great news if your are a 16 year old girl or gay (don't get me wrong - he was very good in Black Hawk Down and Lucky Number Slevin). Anyway, somehow we missed Joshy, not sure how as he would have had to walk straight past us. Never Mind.

To cut an already long story short - ended up in pub, 3 pints down waiting for that ugly, skinny, noodle-armed Murray get spanked by Nadal at Wimbledon. The journalists of the daily newspapers must have been on Crack. One headline read "How to muscle up like Murray" - have these people heard of Dorian Yates...obviously not!

Moral of the story: Being in an airport defintely helps beat the boredom, I think it is something to do with being around 100's of other people who are just as f*****g bored - the only difference is in 24 hours they will be somewhere sunny and i'll be at home watching Richard and Judy :-/