Mr Larrington's Automatic Diary: Days 0 & 1: Larrington Towers

Hello, Constant Readers, and welcome to the fifth instalment of the Automatic Diary. This post will, out of necessity, be a fairly brief post as it's gone 23:00 here and I've been checked in for under an hour chiz. But back to yesterday.

Due to the combination of an iffy knee and a very iffy elbow, I decided to avoid hauling The Luggage through the hell of the London Underground on a Saturday morning and opted for the hell of the M25 on a Friday afternoon instead. Down to visit Aged Father, get sumptuously fed and watered and watch Chelsea lose to Bayern.

On penalties chiz.

Saturday am and Ho! for LHR in a minicab. Check in, smoke fag, do security. Something is amiss. It turns out that the weighted base for Emily the Twat-Nav contains lots of little lead balls, which the X-Ray machine thought were shotgun pellets. Even if I did have a box of shotgun pellets, I rather think it would have been a tricky proposition to bring down a 747 thus armed. What was I going to do, make the pilots eat them, and wait?

Duty-Free, pint, to the gate. It has changed. Not a good omen. I check the board. My 13:05 departure will now leave at 15:30 because the original plane broke and they had to find another one in their toy box It was astounding to see the number of idiots approaching the gate staff waving passports and boarding cards when the number of people slumped sighing in the nearby seats should have made it obvious to anyone with a modicum of intelligence that boarding had not yet commenced.

Finally it did, and some considerable time later Captain Scrack-Thing put the machine into gear and mastered the miracle of heavier-than-air flight. He had his foot down too, so the three and a half hours lost at Heathrow became but two and a half at JFK. And even getting through Immigration wasn't too bad, though something went a bit odd for me and They took me aside for a few questions. "Orange jumpsuit here I come" I thought but they were very nice about it and the Chief Inquisitor told me to enjoys my fags and Scotch...

The Luggage has been to New York...

BBC lie about weather. It is not 22 degrees with showers, no, it is 32 degrees and as humid as the South was last year. Away to Mr Dollar's Emporium of Motoring Wonders. I haz a convertible and, praise be, 'tis a Mustang so, although it's white, I don't have to change the picture at the top of the page. I can fit The Luggage in the boot rather than wrestle it into the back of a piss-awful Chrysler. And have half as much powwaaaah again to (right) boot. Leave the top up as it's dark by the time I leave the airport.

I do not pretend to understand where Emily took me exiting NYC but clearly the "Avoid Toll Roads" setting worked. I wouldn't have minded paying $7.50 to avoid major-league faffage from 59th Street northwards but I got here in the end.