altered by the very act of viewing

Tues 07/05/2008 12:30 GMT, Glasgow Airport gate 25:
Although I've been far more rested over the past few days than recently we've woken up fairly early and have then been kept awake by tweeting little birdythings and nerves. Still far far far better than being woken up by impending-deadline work-tension and not being able to get back to sleep for thinking about things to remember to have to do the next day. The other thing keeping me awake between 05:30 and 08:00 this morning was the odd intermittent rumble passing through the hotel; I assume it's something to do with the nearby airport but it could always have been a secret underground transport system unless the one we know about underneath Glasgow comes anywhere near here. Every now and then the rumble of trains can be heard in the lower levels of the office, too. A few flats ago I heard and felt the odd low-frequency rumble in the top floor on St. Patrick's Square which I initially suspected of being passing buses or lorries but which I eventually twigged would have been the sound of explosions from films from the nearby (and now sadly ex-) Clerk Street Odeon.

18:40 GMT, 11km upwards and 120km WSW of Keflavik:
Hmmm. Initially our BMI connection to Heathrow was announced as being about twenty minutes late; not normally an issue with our usual cheapy-carrier-holidays but when we only had an hour or so at Heathrow to make the onward flight it wasn't something we particularly wanted to hear though we weren't initally that concerned as (though the check-in closure time was listed as 14:45) the flight time was supposed to be 16:15. However, the twenty minutes became more like forty then more like an hour. We'd checked when checking-in that our bags would know where they were going and that we wouldn't need to waste precious minutes waiting for them to appear on a carousel before checking them in again a couple of terminals away but it was still going to make things a little tight, especially when we hit the pre-Heathrow stack and spent an amusing twenty-five minutes circling around (unfortunately on the tilted-upward side) before what seemed like an incredibly leisurely descent. Nicky had started talking to a nice lady at the departure gate who was on the same flights as us as far as Auckland (though a good thirteen rows nosewards Beyond the Curtain) who had been told her evening flight had been cancelled, thus forcing her onto the 16:15 which it looked as if she would now miss. She seemed confident that as we'd booked all the flights and connections through Air New Zealand themselves that we would at least be immediately re-booked upon missing the onward flight even if it turned out to be at eight o'clock the following morning if the evening flight was still inoperative. Everyone stood up in the aisle as soon as the seatbelt light was extinguished after an agonisingly lethargic taxi so we had to wait our turn to get off the aircraft. Thereafter we were somewhat thankful for the nice obvious purple signs telling us where to go as onwardly-connected people; luckily there was a bus waiting to depart to Terminal 3 which left pretty much as soon as we were all on board. We didn't know whether the bus was a safer bet than walking so just had to commit and hope. Out of the bus, a short wait for the bus driver to saunter over and unlock the door to the terminal building and the running could start again. We'd only encountered one desk anxious to see our documents up to this point and we weren't sure if the scan had resulted in the onward-flight knowing that we were at the airport but by this point I'd managed to get through BAA's website to the live departure information on my phone and could see that NZ001 was listed as "LAST CALL" though couldn't see anything useful such as the gate number. A few more twists and turns through a few corridors led to security; thank fuck they didn't insist on swabbing my external hard drive for explosives this time and that nothing beeped. Around a few more corners and we finally reached a departure board: "CLOSING" isn't really what you want to see but at least it told us we were meant to have been at gate 16. As luck would have it gates 13 to 16 or so were the furthest away of the 55 available but with a combination of sprinting, sprinting along moving walkways and sprinting along moving walkways hoping that people would heed my footsteps and shift over enough to let me past I finally got to a desk with some staff on it including someone who asked "Auckland?" and waved me through another door. They were waiting for us and were a couple of seconds from closing but were prepared to at least wait the few extra minutes it would take for Nicky and our co-delayee to cover the half-mile since the departure board. I described it as a couple of minutes but it was more like five by the time they finally appeared at the end of the walkway. So much for having a couple of spare minutes to buy another couple of litres of hideously-overpriced air-side water and an MP3 player for Nicky but at least we didn't have to discover first-hand what it's like to have to sleep the night in an airport.

19:05 GMT, 11km up and 100km off the coast of Greenland:
(Fourteen rows further nosewards):
Arf. Nicky had asked one of the wedding guests (the pilot boyfriend of a colleague) about the best procedure to try and snaffle an upgrade on the basis of being on our honeymoon; his advice ("dress smartly in shoes and trousers and a shirt") was probably too much of a gamble if it risked having to spend a twenty-three hour flight in shoes, trouser and shirt in scum class against the slight possibility of there being spaces in shiny.
However...
One of the cabin crew came over, squatted at the end of the row and asked if we were Mr & Mrs Shaw; we're not but we knew who she meant. I'd assumed she was over to tell us that our luggage hadn't been as fleet of foot as us between terminals and would be a little delayed in reaching our destination, especially after asking if we'd had an issue with our previous flight. Turned out the nice lady we'd run through the airport with had wangled us permission to saunter through the curtain to the empty one-class-up seats sitting vacant in front of her. Result, especially as these are now our seats for the remaining twenty hours of flying-time. We've already been given two freebies and now have a bottle of water tucked in the seat-net in front of us (under which my legs can be stretched out to their full length), have a little locker next to us for our bags and have been given free drink and apples. Thank you very much, nice lady.
I shall now resume watching Cloverfield followed by There Will Be Shouting, No Country for Old Men and then maybe a little light sleeping or reading before our two-hour sit-in-a-cupboard transit session in LAX.

21:00 GMT, 11.5km above Greenland:
Whoah.

Tues 07/05/2008 11:56 GMT, somewhere over America:
Lots and lots of square fields beneath us at the moment. No idea where it is; there are a few reasonably distinct-looking river-twistinesses about but as one is not permitted to use the internets in an aeroplane it's impossible to work it out using Google Maps and the on-board where-the-hell-are-we function thingby is stuck showing the entire world in Mercator projection with the sunlit areas indicated and a large aeroplane over the top of the USA pointing SSW. I managed to correctly ID a chunk of French coastline we passed over once by taking a few pictures of it and searching for it when home but it would be a lot easier if the in-flight information was active. Maybe we're supposed to be sleeping at the moment; they fed us a tea-like meal almost as soon as we'd boarded, taken off and levelled out so I assume the aircraft was operating to GMT and that it is now time for sleepy-byes. Still not sure how best to approach this time difference thing; although we'll be landing in the eight-hours-behind Pacific time zone we'll be there for barely two hours for our fingerprinting and intimidation before setting off again. I was thinking that I might just try and stay awake until it becomes late evening in New Zealand in seven hours' time and then go to sleep so that when we arrive in their morning I'll think it is morning. I have the digital display on my watch set to destination time to aid this. Not sure when to switch to NZ time for blip-calendar entry-date configuration; I have yet to change the date on my camera so shall have to watch that I have enough pictures over a wide enough time range to cover each day.