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I'm fairly normal and I don't suffer from phobias but I find holidays are soooo stressful. There's two weeks of packing and wondering what to take, followed by a taxi drive to the airport (I hate it when someone else is driving) (*) followed by a lengthy wait at the airport - mostly standing in a queue. Then you get crowded into a big aluminium tube with 300 other people. After twenty minutes of having luggage dropped on your head, it's inspection time. The cabin staff walk down the aisle and inspect everyone's flies to make sure they are zipped up and not bulging too much. Well, that's how it seems to me. I like to listen to an audio book on my iPod to distract me but the cabin staff always moan at me to "switch off electronic devices during takeoff". As if an iPod is gonna make the plane crash! So I try to read a book instead and they switch off the goddamn cabin lights. Then I get shouted at for unfastening my seat belt so I can switch on that overhead torch! Then you have the flight with attendants trying to sell you garbage and force you to eat crap from a little plastic box with plastic knife and fork. (I once ate the fork tines by accident!) Then the landing - "no, sir, you must switch off your iPod", even if you are p;ssing yourself with fear. Then a week of hell with hot, burning sun, foreign food, hard beds, biting insects, expensive water, strange toilets, English people who mostly seem to come from Moss side in Manchester and a wife who's determined to shop till I drop. Then the final day when it always rains. (I think they arrange this deliberately so you feel better about leaving - as if you'd want to stay!) The coach journey back to the airport. The long queues and tannoy announcements that you can't understand. Fellow passengers from Manchester that you can't understand, all beetroot red ("nice tan, eh, mate?"), silly hats, flamboyant shorts exposing horrid red bumps on legs (mosquito bites?) and smelling of sweat and sun lotion. OK, go back to (*) above. It's such a relief to get back home and plan the next holiday! Copyright ©2006 Glodark Updated June 1, 2006 This file may be downloaded for private and personal use but NO part of it may be published in any form without the prior permission of the author.