God bless the Irish

I love the Irish. I've always loved the Irish, because they are good-humoured and have good booze; they throw a great party, and they gave the world, amongst other things, The Pogues and Father Ted. I even love them for populating the world with bars which guarantee I can have a vaguely acceptable pint and watch some sport wherever I am in the world. And now I love them even more because they got me safely home. I love them in spite of the fact that their in-flight entertainment system broke, so I couldn't watch The Hurt Locker for the third time in an effort to catch the end without falling asleep. In fact, I giggled when, after two attempts to show the safety video and failing, a timid voice came over the tanoy saying "All flight attendants to their stations for a MANUAL check."

It seems we are not the only ones who love the Irish. The only other time I've been on a flight that has broken into spontaneous applause on hitting the runway was on a particularly bumpy flight back to Guernsey one winter, and in that instance passengers were showing their appreciation at not being dead, which is not quite the same.

Relieved to be finally back on British soil, tapping away on my own computer with Cocteau Twins playing away in the background as I sip proper tea, I've been browsing various news websites to find that many people haven't been too fortunate. Thousands are still abroad and will be until May. Oh and I was particularly interested by some of the comments here presumably from people who were not left in limbo for days in a foreign country. Now, as it happens, we did, in the end, have a rather good additional 4 days in the States, but this was only once we'd got out of the chaotic labyrinth that was the Response to the Volcano, i.e. personnel from the Foreign Office to Virgin Atlantic taking refuge under their desks and saying "Please don't hurt me!"

So what was the response? Well, it was this:
We were due to fly home on 19th from Washington. Our flight was cancelled. Fine, we thought. This has been going on for a few days. Virgin will have this in hand. So, as instructed by their website, we phoned them.

49 times.

On the 49th time, we eventually reached a recorded message (previous calls had cut us off or given us the engaged tone.) So we settled back to wait for a reply and listening to the recorded message, singing the praises of Virgin's complimentary amenity packs (they come with socks and eye masks. Oh yes.) We listened for two hours and 5 minutes. Then a chirpy woman called Rachel answered (I say chirpy... I'm lying...) Now to be fair to Rachel she'd probably been getting it in the neck all day from stranded Brits and had the right to be well and truly fed up with her lot on life by the time we got to her. Rachel offered us a flight on May 4th. We pointed out to her that this was over two weeks away, and perhaps not entirely practical, and thus followed the obligatory lecture on how we were not the only people stuck (a fact we were well aware of having encountered some very harrassed looking teachers and a hoard of teenagers from if their accents were anything to go by, somewhere in the Midlands, grabbing fast food at the Old Post Office earlier in the day - a position I can't even bear to imagine).The next day the skies began to clear and planes started flying, and by the following day things were almost back to normal. At any rate, US television had stopped covering it (it had been receiving, ooh, I'd say about 5 minutes each hour up until then. In fact, to my amusement, Fox News reported Nick Clegg's performance in the first TV debate above the fact that the whole of Europe was out of bounds, and the rest of the time were too busy calling Obama a Marxist to much bother about anything else.) So we tried to phone them again to see if anything had come up. We tried at 10pm and were on hold for 2 hours. We got up at 5am, and again, after 18 attempts, were put on hold. For two hours. At 7.15 we gritted our teeth and booked ourselves a flight from Boston a whole week earlier than the one we'd been promised by Virgin. Aer Lingus described availability on this flight as "good". We could, incidentally, also have flown into Schiphol, where we have a friend (he doesn't actually live at the airport, obviously, but nearby...) In fact, we would have been happy to be flown anywhere which meant we were on the right continent, and would make our own way back from there. We told Virgin this. They repeated that we had to take what we were given.

I'm not for a minute suggesting that Eric the Volcano (as I'm calling it, not even attempting to pronounce or spell its actual name) was in any way some sort of clever airline ruse to keep us trapped in the US, though I'm sure the US government will find a way of blaming Iran sooner or later. On the contrary, I do have some sympathy with the airlines, who must have all lost millions. However, to all the anonymous and supercilious web commentators out there, I'd like to make the following points:
- One commented that airlines were not putting their seat prices up for stranded passengers, they got to fly for free. Well, not quite. We got to fly for the price we'd paid if we were prepared to put our lives on hold for a fortnight. This would cost us, the airline company itself (who under EU law are obliged to pay our bed and board during that time) and our employers quite a bit of cash, while at the same time there are planes flying with empty seats.
- Yes indeed. We flew back with Aer Lingus - lovely, wonderful Aer Lingus - and counted 9 empty seats on that flight. And yet we were not offered the chance to fly back with a carrier other than our own. Virgin, who we'd paid already, could have offered us a transfer - even if they'd asked us to pay the difference. They didn't. (Some airlines apparently did.)
- This doesn't seem wholly fair. It seems even less fair when you realise there are families with young kids, and teenagers who are meant to be taking GCSE and A Level exams shortly, who are still stuck, and who don't have the money to just go ahead and book another flight. There were two of us - imagine being a family of 5?
- Yes, airlines pay bed and board, but you need to ask for that to be refunded AFTER You get back. Again, how on earth do they expect family groups to just pop sums like that on the credit card?
- Having browsed the internet, I realise that one thing that would be handy would be some sort of site that told you how to access healthcare abroad - what you might need to pay, and, specifically, how to get a prescription if yours runs out, and how much this might cost. Contacting the Embassy in such an instance involved access to a phone, and even if you got this far, you were then faced with another recorded message telling you if you were stranded you should "contact your airline or travel provider." My airline can't even staff its phoneline, let alone dish out drugs.

But, on a cheerier note, I want to say...
- Thank you to all the people who flooded my Facebook page with offers of places to stay all across America - and indeed to their cousins, friends and others whose floors and spare rooms they were volunteering for us.
- Thank you to all the people in the US who made us feel welcome, from waitresses to tour guides (with the exception of the bloke in the hotel who was obsessed with Baltimore. Mate, you need help! Get over Edgar Allan Poe, already, he's been dead for years. Oh, and the father who loudly told his kids in Boston that we had a nerve being there. I know - F and I personally kicked your ass at Bunker Hill and are now almost 300 years old! How can we show our faces?)
- Thank you to our friends in the UK who sent encouraging messages and listened to our email rants.
- Thanks to whoever the artist was who put these cows in Logan airport - yes, I'm not sure if the one on the left is wearing sunglasses or a black bra over its eyes, either...

- And once again thank you to the beautiful people of Aer Lingus.