So, I’m sitting in the airport in Bogotá in Colombia.  Naturally my flight from Paris got here late and I missed my connection to Medellin, so I have to wait another four hours for another flight.  I have been on the go for about 20 hours at this stage.

I was woken this morning (seems like a lifetime ago, now) by my phone ringing.  A strong Dublin accent on the other end of the line telling me that my taxi was outside the door waiting for me and he didn’t want to ring the doorbell in case it woke other people up.

Yep, I had failed to set my alarm properly.

I didn’t really even have time for a few unparliamentary expletives, but I realised immediately that I was going to have to go on a hell of a long journey without having a shower first.  

Worse still, I hadn’t even packed my bag - been too busy over the last few days to get all my laundry done in time, so I had my stuff on radiators drying.

So, my first seven minutes of today were as follows -

4:38 - Phone rang, James mentally runs through entire lexicon of bad language.

4:40 - Packed bag

4:42 - Brushed teeth and packed washbag.

4:44 - Completed dressing

4:45 - Sat into taxi and directed driver (who mercifully stayed quiet for the whole journey and who was thankfully a non-smoker, which is the first from Terenure cabs) to Dublin airport.

Ate brown-coloured food in Dublin Airport - fried stuff, apart from wholemeal bread.

Tried to get nice seats on flights, but only got aisle seats, not exit seats.

first flight OK.  Second flight, slept a bit.  One of the sir stewards was the spitting image of Walter Matthau.

Collected my bag in Bogotá - it is soaked.  Presumably with rain.

Bogotá looks cool. Flat, high in the Andes. Clearly, meat is popular - at least in the diet of airport-going people.

But yes, somehow it is a fit of Deja Vu.  Third intercontinental flight in four months, two to South America and one to North America, so the feeling of being shattered while still having miles to go is once again making itself known and that furry-teeth, furry tongue, bleary eye, too-much-tea-and-coffee, sore-arse-from-sitting-on-it-for-most-of-the-day feeling is setting in.

I have a paper to review for the journal Science and a book chapter to review, none of which I could get done on the flights because some German in the seat in front of me had it reclining all the way back for the entire flight and I would have had to hold the papers either up in the air or about 4 inches from my nose.  Sigh.

Roll on the Sheraton in Medellin.

I suppose it is better than the M50.