As High As You Can Get

Now if you have been reading very carefully indeed for the last three years you will know that my worst-ever job was during the summer of 1994, when I survived two weeks as a comically incompetent trainee skirt pleater in Gorton, south Manchester- only managing to escape when, owing to a bizarre sequence of events rather too complicated to relate here, my place on the shopfloor was taken by the exiled son of a Ugandan Prince living in straitened circumstances in a Victoria Park bedsit, who my flatmate had found one Sunday afternoon down the launderette.

All of which is simply a roundabout way of leading up to telling you about my second-worst-ever job, which came much earlier- in the long hot indiepop summer of 1988, when I was in between my first and second years at Wolverhampton Polytechnic.  Finding that the fortnightly dole money was stretching no further than six pints of McEwans Best Scotch and a Darling Buds single, I reluctantly signed up to become a catering assistant at Newcastle Airport, then enjoying a brief boom transporting daily small armies of Glaswegians off to package holidays in Benidorm and other Godforsaken points of the Mediterranean littoral.

We operated a punishing shift pattern- one week starting at five in the morning and slogging through past lunchtime, the next starting at lunch but not finishing until eleven at night.  The work itself consisted of clearing the tables, scrubbing the dishes, and, most memorably of all, manning the tills when the shout went up of 'Delay!', meaning that any second now three hundred ravenous Scottish people would come bounding up the stairs from the departure lounge brandishing £5.00 refreshment vouchers from their charter companies like freshly-sharpened claymore, and generally looking to our sleep-deprived eyes like a terrifying mix between a crowd scene out of Braveheart and a particularly gruesome riot at a Jesus and Mary Chain concert. 

If the long hot indiepop summer of 1988 was the first time in my hitherto genteel suburban existence I had made the prolonged acquaintance of The Sort Of People Who Went On Package Holidays (we might have lived on a council estate in the West End but we were strictly a rainy-week-at-the-seaside-caravan and disastrous-camping-adventure-ruined-by-cousin's-rampaging-dog sort of family) then it was also the first time I had come across planespotters; these lone middle-aged men with notebooks who would sidle up to your table-clearing trolley and enquire, 'Is this as high as you can get'?

Once we realised these dishevilled fellows were not making enquiries about our lack of professional and personal ambition, but simply looking for the top deck viewing platform, we would direct them towards the lifts to the upper concourse, and never see them again.  They used to bring their own flasks and sandwiches so had no use for our £1.75 cups of watered-down coffee (never mind our £4.25 plates of reheated chicken casserole that had come from a vat and didn't really have any chicken in, because the big fat Geordie chefs had nicked all the good bits for their breakfast).  I had forgotten about the whole phenonenon of planespotting, in fact, until last weekend, when I decided to take young Frankie (who has grown fascinated with air travel since we came back from the place he calls 'Americawhereabbyandjohnandoscarthebabylive') along to the airport to watch the planes taking off. 

Needless to say, we found (or at least I did, Frankie's memory doesn't go back that far) that planespotters in 2007 Manchester are in every respect indistinguishable from those in 1987 Newcastle.  There were maybe fifteen of them in all, huddled together in the corner of the sun-baked upper deck of the carpark in ill-fitting anoraks.  Their necks were festooned with an array of high-end binoculars, which they kept constantly trained on the runway action.  I say 'action' but there really wasn't any-or at least, there was very little to speak of.  Once every twenty minutes a massive colourful jetplane would take off (with spectacular supersonic special effects, causing me, Frankie, and the smattering of other daytripping-dads-with-their-lads to look up suddenly from our sandwiches and mouth 'Wow!' to each other) but the seasoned hobbyists in the prime viewing positions would studiously ignore such amateurish pyrotechnics in favour of training their expensive eyepieces on- I assumed- some rare piece of ground equipment being used to transport a load of suitcases from a parked Boeing to a Terminal Three conveyor belt. 

After the best part of an hour (and fourteen miniature home-made ham sandwiches each from our packed lunch box) me and Frankie were becoming ever-so-slightly restless at the slow midday pace on the sweltering upper deck.  I made enquiries as to the possibility of any upturn in the airborne action with a nearby chap who I took to have some kind of official responsibility , given that he was turned out in full RAF uniform complete with freshly starched shirt, regimental cap and (although I admit the sun was getting to me a bit by this stage) a blazer covered liberally with gleaming medals.  The fellow took one look at us and made a bolt for the lifts- I think he may have been somewhat shy, even for a planespotter.  We gave the bashful wannabee wing-commander ten minutes then followed his lead, ending up downstairs in the main departure lounge, where I flagrantly disregarded a stern-looking sign ordering 'No Children Beyond This Point' to wheel Frankie's pushchair into a postion from where we could both take in the last ten minutes of the Manchester derby on a big screen in the corner of a darkened and smoke-filled room. 

On the way back out to the train station, veering unsteadily between giggling Easyjetters and congoing sunburnt United fans filled with championship fervour on the strength of Ronaldo's first-half penalty and fifteen Duty-free Embassy Regal, I felt a trifle faint all of a sudden.  It may have just been the overpriced Boddingtons and the sunstroke of course- but I suspect that in there somewhere a dose of nostalgia was playing havoc with my damn nerves.  Hell, if a shout of 'Delay!' had come over the tannoy it would possibly have finished me off altogether, or at least sent me scurrying off to the tills ready to put in a graveyard shift.  That long hot indiepop airport summer of 1988- when I spent so many hours on the middle concourse of Newcastle Airport that I really did suspect it was As High As I Could  Ever Get- has a lot to answer for, for damn sure.

Comments

[Ben]

That was one of my favourite days out as a kid: a couple of hours on the roof of Newcastle Airport. And to think that some people (e.g. my better half) find it laughable. At least we didn't get conned into buying any chicken-free chicken casserole - oh no, we would go to Little Chef on the way home...

Happier, more innocent times.

[looby]

I quite like plane spotters. It's quintessentially English. It was quite amusing to see the bemusement of the Greek authorities in that court case the other year when those plan spotters where put briefly in jail because they simply could not comprehend the idea of plane spotting as a leisure activity.

I quite like airports myself - there's something so artificial about them. When I used t work on the railways we occasionally had to spend a couple of hours hanging around Gatwick and it was fascinating - I didn't want to come home.

Anyway, must go, Asda has got an offer on anoraks which runs out tonight.

[jonathan]

Aye well it's a harmless enough pursuit when all is said and done. And anoraks (I'm talking about the actual coats here not the nowadays-eponymous people who wear them in pursuit of their lone outdoor hobbies) are also unfairly maligned in my view- in fact I might start praising them to the skies on here in the hope someone sends me a nice comfortable one- perhaps yellow, with sporty black stripes down the sleeves- in the post. Kagools on the other hand I have no time for- largely because I am never sure how to spell them.

Oh and Ben- apparently we used to get taken on trips to the airport as well- although we must have been too young to remember. We certainly never got on any planes- you didn't really need one to make the twelve-mile journey east to Whitley Bay, where we generally spent our week's summer holiday. Hell, it was positively exotic, man-there were Scottish people there staying in the caravans, who, when for all your life you had only come across Geordies, were about as exotic as people from the moon...