Isn't t'interweb wonderful ?

This is what its like being a father who has to pretend that he's unconcerned about everything in the world and his family because he thinks that its cool to be cool and unconcerned.

Last night Amanda (eldest daughter, 18) left these shores with her boyfriend for a week of raving and whatever else it is that the young and feckless do in the Ibiza-aen resort of San Antonio.

I've seen the TV documentaries of what goes on in San Antonio and believe me - I just don't want to know ok ? Its just my job to get her to and from the airport and make sure she has enough spending money for seven days - "enough spending money" for the females in our house means enough to ensure that they don't have to count it every day.

So with Suzanne (wife) and Jodie (youngest, 15) away in Newcastle for the weekend (they also leached me for spending money) and Amanda staying at her boyfriend's parents house I'm on my own for the weekend, wonderful news. Yesterday I arose early, took Jake to the vets (anal glands, oh to be a vet), went to the library, bought six titanium koi carp for the pond (she will do her nut when she sees the credit card) and then spent the rest of the day repairing and painting the garage door - there, that wasn't so exciting was it ?

And as the afternoon dragged on and I could watch the whole of the practice session for the Silverstone F1 grand prix and then watch the whole of the prolog to the Tour de France without a female coming in the room and switching either MTV or the Coronation Street omnibus on without reference to me, I started to wonder where Amanda was and whether or not she should/shouldn't be packing a suitcase yet.

Eventually I rang her and as always happens she was getting out of the car in the driveway so told me to stop bothering her, she had loads of time before she needed to go to the airport, an hour and ten minutes to be precise.

Now if it were me then I'd just need the ten minutes, but it takes Amanda at least a couple of hours to get ready just to take something out to the dustbin, but why should I care, its her missed flight not mine.

A few minutes after she'd gone upstairs she came back down again, "how much can I take" she asked, I checked the Jet2.com web site - only 18kg of luggage plus a handbag was the reply.

"Can I take cosmetics in the cabin", why do women always have to carry cosmetics, surely when you put makeup on it stays on doesn't it ?

"Yes" was the answer, but it has to be contained in a transparent ziploc bag so that security know that you are not a fanatical suicide bomber for apparently fanatical suicide bombers can't get their hands on transparent ziploc bags, must be something to do with their religion.

We didn't have any transparent ziploc bags in the house and with a temper tantrum threatening I got out the car and went to Tesco's to buy some - 50 minutes to go.

"Where are the bathroom scales" she cried from upstairs and I had to admit I didn't know, I hadn't seen them since we moved house, so I rang Suzanne and had to leave what was probably the daftest voicemail message on the networks yesterday - "what have you done with the bathroom scales ?"

With nothing to weigh her suitcase with she had to ring Chris, her boyfriend, and tell him to bring bathroom scales with him when he came, sure enough he turned up with a suitcase under one arm and some bathroom scales under the other - we weighed their cases, 20kg each, thats just the £20 in excess charges then, Jet2.com have to get their costs back somehow, they certainly don't overcharge on the prices, £170 return for two of them for a 1000 mile flight, at this rate we'll be having pop concerts every frikkin week to try and combat carbon emissions - what do you mean we already do ?

Fifteen minutes to go.

She took some things out of her suitcase and put them in her hand baggage, this is the completely stupid thing about air travel, they limit your main baggage to minute proportions then allow you to carry a half hundredweight of junk on board and put it in a locker above your head, especially if you've bought it in their expensive flight-side, captive audience, two hours to kill, former duty free shops.

Finally we were ready to be transported to the airport, the drive took exactly three minutes.

I may have mentioned before that we live on the peak of the biggest hill around these parts - well just across the valley on the peak of the next big hill going up towards Wharfedale is Leeds/Bradford Airport, if I were geeky enough I could sit in my bay window at home and watch the aircraft day and night, last night I was geeky enough.

Arrived at the airport to find security crawling all over the place with the drop-off zone in front of the terminal closed by heavy concrete barricades - this is what happens when a terrorist drives a Jeep Cherokee into an airport terminal frontage and tries to explode it and himself managing only to set fire to it and himself at Glasgow airport last week - everyone now has to be inconvenienced because the authorities are afraid that another one of us will get it into our heads that driving into an airport building would be a really funny thing to do, believe me guys, it isn't and it wouldn't be something that I'd be thinking of doing last night, honestly.

But to no avail, I was diverted into the short stay car park where I had to take a ticket from the barrier which merrily told me that it was going to charge £2.10 for the first 20 minutes of my stay, it fekking wasn't because I'd have removed the exit barrier from its hinges before I paid but fortunately they seem to have had the good sense to tinker with its gubbins and allowed the first 20 minutes for free.

So they were gone - two 18 year olds striding confidently to the airport departure lounge off on their own little adventure to Balieric hedomy, and I was left a little deflated, just a tad saddened, another link in the chain broken, my first born, the one that I can still remember holding just seconds after her birth, holding even before her mother got to hold her, the one that I did all the night feeds with as her mother snored in the next bedroom, the hours that we spent sitting in the rocking chair with all the world asleep outside the window, her sucking on a formula milk bottle, me talking gibberish - she's all growed up now and I've been reduced to money provider and taxi driver.

And still its hard not to be concerned, got home and loaded up t'interweb and logged onto the Leeds/Bradford Airport web site where you can view the live arrival/departure boards online and I'm ashamed to say, last night I was geeky enough to sit in the bay window with the laptop refreshing its departure board every minute until just after 9pm it indicated that her flight was boarding - then I did a really geeky thing.

I sent her a text message telling her that her flight was boarding.

30 seconds later I got one back asking me how I knew that, and telling me she was missing me already, not - sarcastic bugger, I wonder where she gets that from.

I watched as the departure board indicated that the gate was closed and then, because you can see all of this from our living room window, I watched as the 737 was turned around and taxied to the end of the runway nearest to us and I saw it start its run a few seconds before the engine noise arrived across the valley, it disappeared for a few seconds over the brow of the hill and then I watched as it climbed up into a glorious summer evening sky, at 9.33pm just a few minutes late, and I watched as it turned and headed off towards Manchester and the west coast north/south routes until it was just a speck in the sky, and then gone.

How geeky is that ?
How uncool is that for a dad who pretends to be cool and not bothered ?

And just for the record the Ibiza airport arrivals board shows that they arrived at 1.18am this morning, probably just in time to check in to the hotel and go straight out to a club.

Ho-hum, another day to fill on my own, more watercolour painting it is then and a quick wizz around with the vacumn cleaner before I travel up to Newcastle to pick the two females up and have my answer ready for the first question "of course I've kept the house clean, its all I've been bloody doing all weekend"


PS - 11pm last night and a text message arrives from Suzanne in Newcastle - "why do you need the bathroom scales you fat bastard", I'm just not appreciated around here you know.

...the problem with Whickers Island is ...

Every UK male of a certain age will be able to finish off the sentence in the title. It is of course from the Monty Pythons Flying Circus tribute to one of British TV's most enduring images, Alan Whicker - "...the problem with Whickers Island is...that there are just too many Whickers" - you had to be there, it was funny I promise you.

Alan Whicker was the must-watch travel icon on British TV for most of the 60's, 70's and 80's, not that any of us could ever dream of going to most of the places he went to in the 60's and 70's - only now in the grown up world of cheap jet travel can some of us (not me, but some anyway) actually go and visit the sorts of places that Alan Whicker did, but even now we still can't get access to the stuff that Wicker saw, touched and smelled once a week on our black and white TV's.

I'm currently watching a 1978 episode of Whickers World on one of the Discovery Travel channels and even from the starting titles you can tell that this is going to be no ordinary travelogue, the first few seconds of the intro show Concorde flying high above the clouds, flashing past the aircraft that was filming it and the jazzy, fast paced intro music takes you to a world that none of us ever inhabited but the very rich and very titled - Alan Whicker was the Judith Chalmers of the jetset, his clipped nasal vowels with its classic English accent brought an air of civility to some of the very uncivil places that he visited and no matter which country he visited he was never seen outside of a smart blue blazer and tie, or in the case of the programme that I am currently watched, a well pressed beige safari suit as a small concession to the heat of central India.

The fascinating thing about Whickers World (1959-1994) is that it is still fresh and still interesting and in fifty years time it will be a valuable archive into how the British viewed those bloody foreigners but also a valuable archive into those bloody foreigners themselves who are even now losing their own identity as McDonalds and Sony take over the world.

For instance in "Whickers World in India", Alan Whicker chose the central state of Rajastan to visit and started the programme by explaining how this huge state (three times bigger than the UK) used to be owned by independant Raj's who were told to rennounce their titles (they were viewed almost as gods by their people) and give up their lands to form the new state under Indian government rule rather than each individual Raj enforcing his own version of the lawbook.

And they did, in theory. In theory the Indian Government thought that they ruled the region, but in practice life went on as it always had - and this is where Wicker went in 1978 to interview the beautiful widow of one of the last and greatest of the Raj's, she was still young when Wicker interviewed her even though her husband had committed suicide twenty years earlier, still young because she had been married to him at the age of twelve.

She told a frank tale of a crazy ruler of tens of thousands of people in a time when the ultimate act for any widow was to throw yourself onto your dead husbands funeral pyre and die with him - fortunately for her the practice had become illegal when the old Raj died although it was still being practiced with the authorities turning a blind eye to it - the old Raj had so many wives that she'd have been at the back of a long queue and the pyre would have kept burning for weeks if they'd all jumped.

The old Raj had in theory committed suicide because of the stripping of power by central government, he thought it was disgraceful and that he had brought great shame on the family name by allowing it to happen, so one day he sat in his study, took out a finely carved, gold embossed rifle, summoned one of his servants to the room and ordered him to shoot him and make it look like suicide - the Raj beleived that a Raj should not stoop so low as to actually commit suicide himself, one should always get ones servants to commit suicide on ones person.

Whicker was not afraind of asking awkward or personal questions - sitting in a swinging chair in the widows palace garden he asked her to explain what was meant by the rumours of the Raj's sexual prowess, without batting an eyelid the young widow explained that the Raj was indeed a very sexually active man although not necessarily with his wives - Whickers eyelids raised every so slightly at this revelation and then exploded into mirth as she added "he preferred the young village boys".

She also told of how he was ostracised by the English, not after tales of his cruelty to his villagers with his unique intertpretation of Indian law and punishment were heard at Westminster, but after he had become bored of the royal game of polo and had set fire to all of his polo ponies to get rid of them - the stories of him using live human babies as bait when he went tiger hunting wouldn't have impressed Her Majesty the Queen either.

All in all a fascinating glimpse into a way of life that had disappeared except from memory in 1978 and has probably disappeared permenantly now, except in the old films of Whickers World, a place where an Englishmen never shows sweat marks on his safari jacket, and always wears a blazer and cravat at your hosts evening dinner, even when your host is a naked Bornean chief who eats his rival tribesmen.