Maldon to London
November 1st 1995
I went to London for a few days, on the first, and spent a long time in the travel agent's that i'd sorted out my route over the phone with. There was no problem getting on a flight from London to Colombo, but from there to Trivandrum was fully booked out - on the Air Lanka flights, anyway. Air India was available, but they didn't match up on the return part of the trip, meaning i'd have to spend a couple of nights in Colombo. This wasn't something i really wanted to do, especially as it would cost me an extra sixty pounds to actually have a stopover there, rather than just changing planes. However, it may well have ended up the only choice. I got myself waitlisted for the Air Lanka flights, and confirmed on Air India and would just have to wait and see what came through. From Colombo to KL in January was ok and i was on the wait list for KL to Melbourne in February. Groan... it can be a real drag sometimes, trying to arrange these flights!
The next day, i went to the Indian High Commision to apply for my visa, which was an entertaining couple of hours, as i remembered from the last time i'd done this. There's something about the indian bureacratic system which really amused me. I guessed i was lucky, as a lot of people got irritated by it. But somehow, i enjoyed the bizarre complexity of doing the simplest things.
To get a visa, first you had to queue up at the window outside the building and get an application form (why they couldn't give them out when you went into the visa hall, i was buggered if i knew!) Then you went inside and upstairs to the visa hall, where you had to take a numbered ticket and hang around for an hour or more until your number came up. Then you went up to the counter and one of the people there ticked everything on your form and stapled your (three) photos to it. Then you had to queue up at the 'bank' where, after half an hour, you got to pay for your application. Then you took your receipt, your application form and your passport to another window, via another queue of course, where you deposited it and they gave you a ticket for it. You could then come back at five o'clock in the afternoon on the next working day to pick it up.
I think part of the reason why all this palaver amused me was because i learned a long time before not to rush around trying to do lots of things in a short period of time. One or two things a day seemed reasonable to me, so i was never in a rush to get off somewhere else and do something else, like most Europeans (and especially Londoners) were. Because of this, i'd got the leisure to sit around (or stand around) and enjoy the lunacy of it all. And there were few things in this world that i enjoyed more than lunacy. I think that's why i liked India so much - it was totally crazy! But at least you never got bored.
This first taste of India was a pleasant introduction to the idea that i was going to be there soon. In fact, i was beginning to really look forward to going now. The travel-phobia had more or less dispersed itself and the prospect of a change of scenery was looking really inviting. Especially as it was starting to get extremely cold. It was funny how winter very definitely started on the first of November every time. It said something about the apparent climate changes and things that people talked about a lot. It didn't seem to have changed that much...
On the following Monday, i was back in Maldon, but i thought i'd better go up to the Indian Embassy and pick up my passport, just in case of any complications. So i jumped on a bus to Chelmsford at about three in the afternoon and got on a train to Liverpool Street straight off the bus, more or less, which was lucky as it was a few minutes late. However, this meant i had a while to wait before five o'clock, when the embassy was due to open for passport collection.
I went in a bit early and there were already a good hundred people queuing up at the windows at the counter in the visa hall. I got the idea, by listening to what people were saying, that there were several different queues according to what number ticket you had, but i couldn't really be bothered joining any of them until they started giving the passports out. Lots of people were coming in and joining queues apparently randomly - it was hard to tell whether they knew which queue was what, or if they were just being hopeful.
Eventually, when the place had about three hundred people in it, crammed chaotically into half a dozen different sprawling queues, they finally put the blinds up and opened for business. There were unintelligible announcements about which queue was which and the whole hall turned into a massive rugby scrum. I just sat and watched for a while, entertained by the crazy spectacle of disorganized bureacracy.
It was just as well that i wasn't in too much of a rush to get in the queues, because once i did get to the counter, my passport wasn't there anyway. There were quite a lot of people in the same situation and apparently the embassy staff were still working on getting the last batch of visas done. Despite the apparent disorganization of the visa system, it seemed to be incredibly efficient in reality. There were hundreds of passports involved and a few of them seemed to have gone a bit astray, but it all seemed to be gradually sorting itself out and eventually my passport appeared at the counter.
I went back to Liverpool Street but the first train was packed as it was commuter-hour and i just couldn't face getting onto it. I wasn't really in the mood for rushing back to Maldon anyway. I was feeling happy and optimistic and in a bit of a restless mood. The moon was full and that and the early nightfall which happens at that time of year combined to make me a bit hyper. I went out of the station, across the road and down the stairs into Dirty Dicks, a pub on Bishopsgate, which has probably been there for centuries.
I had a pint of Young's Winter Warmer, a very strong bitter, brewed by a London brewery, but only at that time of year. There was a candle on the table i was sitting at and i sat there staring into it and contemplating nothing in particular for about half an hour. Then i went back to the station and caught the first train, which left a couple of minutes later.
At Chelmsford i hit stupid hour - or two hours, really. The last bus to Maldon had left just as the train had arrived and, after all day of buses every half hour, there wasn't another one now for two hours. It was predictable, i'd kind of expected it, but it didn't leave me any less annoyed.