sabotage?

Granny and a large number of total strangers in holiday gear plotted yesterday. They plotted to damage the tail of the plane carrying them to Granny's island, and back at Gatwick, in transit, to acquire nefarious substances from other travellers, who'd somehow managed to get them through departures security, and somehow managed to be coming via the relevant gate so meeting Granny and her fellows en route, in order that she and they could place the substances (toothpaste? hairgel?) in their handbaggage and blow up the substitute plane they boarded in the guise of continuing their journey. And blow up themselves of course in the process.

Well, actually, they didn't - how did you guess? (And not only from the fact that she is back on her island, writing this....) But they were on a plane that did have to turn back, did come to land with alarmingly heavy sounds (which, they were told but not till afterwards, resulted from safety precautions being taken) and they did find themselves back in departures two hours after leaving it. Half an hour of which was spent in a long queue, while security officials were found and a scanner put in operation to allow them through the necessary swing doors.

'Isn't this security gone mad?' Granny enquired of the woman frisking her yet again. Airport personnel are clearly given a script to work from in these circumstances. Script was spouted - 'suppose you're in the air' etc etc. 'In the air? I wish,' Granny thinks, but doesn't say. Actually she and the rest of them are in the air two hours later, still unfed. She got a free tomato juice and some shortbread biscuits to make up for things - she spurned the alcohol offered - she also the whole spread of 4 seats on a 767 jet, twice the size needed but the only one available to take the stranded passengers. And that was it; home again six hours late. Unblown-up. The airline owes her a meal voucher. But she may not bother to insist on that.

She felt sorrier really for the passengers waiting to go home, who would have been returned to Gatwick between 4 and 5am. She got in a lot of reading anyway; balancing heavy stuff from the Times Literary Supplement (whither history? eg) with the whole of a shlock detective story purchased hurriedly in the airport and was only temporarily alarmed as the plane shook its way slowly - heavily - back into Gatwick. And here she is home again and about to retire to her hammock in the sun. Very nice it is too. Her cat is purring all over her. She is purring all over the cat. (And over Beloved, when he is not being busy, which is most of the time; busy-ness being his business.)

The window are clean too. As for the dust she can remove that herself. Beloved doesn't notice dust, even in this climate, this brightness, where even Granny, hardly a manic. housewife, can't fail to. He is a mere male after all.
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