Tea and Cakes

OK, I may as well admit it here and now. I’m a snob. Totally and utterly. In my own way. I don’t like stupid people. A lot of people fit into that category in my mind. I’m not generally much of a talker. I prefer not to say anything unless it’s worth saying, and I tend to get embarrassed if I speak too much. The massive hangovers I get are the main reason I don’t drink much any more, but all the talking I do if I’m tipsy puts me off too. I just like quiet.

Yesterday I flew with Ryanair through Gatwick airport. There were lots of stupid people, and if my tennis racket and knitting needles hadn’t been packed away safely in my checked luggage I might have been forced to employ them in the absence of a stupid bat. (I really want a stupid bat).

Example A
We arrive in plenty of time to check in. Early in fact. This is partly because arriving super early to airports is one of those things that I do, and partly because on the outward journey I failed to arrive super early and missed the flight. Anyway, this isn’t about me, it’s about stupid people. There was one big queue by the Ryanair counters. For three flights. Eventually one check in desk opened and the queue divided up nicely into two queues. One, that I was in, moving, and one waiting patiently for the other desks to open. A group of women arrive, look at the massive queue, and take themselves right to the front of the non-moving queue. “Excuse me?” said the person at the front, who’d been there at least half an hour. “This is a queue. It starts back there.”
“Oh, sorry, we didn’t realise.” was the response. They then made a huge deal out of moving.

Anyway, that doesn’t really illustrate why stupid people should just shut up, but it does give you an indication of how things were going.

Example B
The airport was really busy, so there was a huge, very slowly moving queue to get through security. In front of us were two slighty overweight middle-class-but-think-they’re-posh ladies and one accompanying gentleman. I arrived mid-conversation:
“Six bags she had. Six!”
“Well, why anyone would want to travel with six…”
“Here for 5 days she said. 5 days! Well, I thought, if they believe that.”
“Well, I she wants to travel with that many bags it’s up to her.”
“Oh. Oh. And I suppose you want all these immigrants here. Think we should welcome them I suppose.”
“I only said…”
It was like listening to the Daily Mail.

Example C
The woman arguing with the security guy about why she should be allowed to take her son’s full sized toy wooden bow and arrow and sword set on the plane as hand luggauge. I don’t need to recount this conversation; you know how it went. I left as he was remaining calm and explaining she needed to go back out and check it in to the hold, and her voice was getting higher and higher and louder and louder.

Example D
We’re on the plane. A family arrives and takes the seats behind us. Four kids and two parents. The mother immediately lays into the poor air hostess, who doesn’t really speak English, about why the gate wasn’t announced earlier as they had to run to get there. Now, admittedly I didn’t have four kids with me, but I managed to stroll slowly down, drinking my coffee as I went, stopping to use the bathroom on the way, and having a good 10 minutes sat in the departure lounge before we could board. I suspect that she and her partner were in the bar, not checking the screens.
Later on the father decides that the fasten seatbelt light doesn’t apply to him, and he needs to use the bathroom. He gets up, walks to the front of the plane, and returns a few minutes later grumbling about how “I’ll piss myself in the seat, then they’ll be happy.”
When we land they have a very long conversation about how they’ll keep one of their kids off school the next day by making her lie to the teachers about the flight time. They follow this with another conversation that I couldn’t follow but couldn’t ignore. I’m not sure what they were saying but they clearly thought that everything the other said was he funniest thing in the world.
It wasn’t.

There are more examples, but I’m too tired even just thinking about them.

Sometimes I wish the whole world would just shut up.