So, recently I recounted the story of how Crapollo, God of Air Travel, decided to teach Kev and I a painful lesson about not leaving enough buffer time for unexpected hitches on the way to Bristol Airport.
Both still reeling from the realisation that the plane was going to Cork without us, we set about making alternative plans to get there.
Naturally, this meant wandering in small circles, furrowed brows focused on our phones, bumping into pillars and stumbling over our dropped baggage, quietly cursing whilst we zapped around Skyscanner looking for the next available flights out of the country.
There was nothing going again from Bristol, Bournemouth or Southampton that day, the flight from Heathrow flew too soon to get there even at warp speed, and there was nothing suitable flying from Gatwick.
I even looked at ferries, but we’d have needed to drive to Liverpool first, only to arrive in Dublin and drive from there. A very long journey that just wasn’t feasible for a two day trip.
There was, however, a flight that left from Luton in a few hours from then and, ever the optimists, we thought could just about make it.
We raced to our car (which luckily hadn’t been towed away after we abandoned it at the end of an aisle) and put Luton Airport into the sat nav.
A few miles into the journey Kev saw reason, “This is ridiculous. We’re never going to make it in time..” and we pulled the car over at the side of the road to scan our phones again for fights.
There was one that left early evening from Stansted.
Unfortunately, the only suitable return journey to allow for the two-day event in Cork arrived back just before midnight on the Thursday, which meant I probably wouldn’t be home until 3am on Friday morning and I needed to get up at about 6am to look after our grandchildren for the day, but I just thought “Suck it up, Buttercup! You obviously need to be taught a lesson about time-planning, and what better way to reinforce the message than the pain of herding toddlers after no sleep”
So, we re-programmed the sat nav and headed to Stansted for a flight we could feel confident of catching.
We decided not to book the flights until we got close to the airport, just in case anything else disrupted our journey.
But at least we felt as if we could breathe for a while, and we reflected on the importance of keeping a good attitude, congratulating ourselves for not ripping each other’s heads off in the heat of the moment back in Bristol.
Despite feeling stressed, we didn’t once turn to blame each other for the f*ck up, even though we had both played a part in organising ourselves badly.
Unfortunately, it’s the natural reaction for many people to make themselves feel better by blaming someone else for things that go wrong in their lives, but because we drill the message home to clients all day every day, we knew that taking full responsibility for our own emotions was the fastest route out the mental shit, so we both focused on managing our own internal states.
A few more miles clicked by on the 2 ¾ hour journey to our next destination.
When I thought we felt sufficiently healed from our trauma, I decided to play a little game.
“I spy with my little eye, something beginning with T…”
Without a moment’s hesitation, and to my great surprise, Kev guessed the exact word I was thinking:
“TOSSER! Your husband is a tosser!”
“No way!” I exclaimed. “That’s the exact word I had in my head! No kidding! Except that I was actually thinking tossers because we’re both equally stupid.”
That single moment will stick in my head as one of the highlights of our relationship.
I mean, sod walking hand-in-hand on a beach or dancing in the rain together, I have never felt more intimately bonded with him than the moment we had Tosser Telepathy.
We laughed until Reading service station about it.
However, Crapollo wasn’t finished with us, and he wiped the smiles off our faces at Stansted.
I’ll tell you more about that tomorrow.
In the meantime, the coaching lesson for today is there is almost always something to laugh about in any shitty situation, so look for that rather than looking for someone to blame.