Strange Tales of the Airport Pick-up Drivers
You know that moment when something surprising makes you sit up and mutter “Blimey!” in mildly truncated awe? Well, I have experienced two examples of the unexpected kind this week. They came in the unlikely forms of an antique half-filled gravy-boat and a whopping great big oil tanker.
Distinctive and contrasting, I know - although I suppose both could enjoy being associated with the word ‘boat’ even if one has no right to make the claim.
So let’s get the antique gravy serving vessel out of the way first. It was brought to my attention by a valet-parking attendant at Stansted Airport. When I reached this highly hectic hub on my way abroad one night last week there was a hitch and I had to park in a nearby car park and be conveyed to the airport in a minibus. It was a short journey and for lack of anything else to do in those dark and lonely hours I asked the driver if he enjoyed his job - a query which inspired him to begin telling me all sorts of strange and interesting stories.
When I returned to Stansted the same bloke picked me up with one of his colleagues. “You’re the journalist chap, aren’t you?” remembered the driver when I climbed into the minibus.
“This is the guy I was telling you about,” he explained to his mate. “He’s the only bloke who has ever shown an interest in our job - and I gave him a real old laugh telling him a few stories.”
His mate agreed that it was a job which required them to deal with some very strange people: “We see it all here,” he laughed. “How about this? We get people drop off their cars and they never come back to get them! What’s that all about? Are they dead somewhere at the other end of the flight? We get other people who obviously live in their cars. Kettles, kitchen sinks… The lot! I picked up a car the other day that was so full of stuff I thought the man had hidden a body in the back. I really did! Didn’t smell too good in there and I couldn’t wait to get out.”
I asked him: what was the strangest thing he’d ever seen in a car?
He thought for a moment, then replied: “That would be the gravy-boat. A real-old fashioned gravy-boat, like one you’d see on the Antiques Road Show! There it was on the front passenger seat of this car, half filled with gravy. Luke-warm gravy! That was six months ago and everyday since I’ve found myself wondering: why? Why a gravy-boat with gravy slopping about on the front seat? It bothers me every time I think of it.”
And now it is bothering me. I have spent hours trying to figure out why someone going to a busy airport would have a half-filled antique gravy-boat on their front passenger seat. A nice shiny gravy-boat ready to go off to an antiques auction, maybe. But not one half-filled. Who would carry such a thing in an expensive car? It could easily topple, then greasy gravy would go all over the place.
So far, no smidgin of a possible explanation has come my way.
So what about that much bigger boat, the oil tanker?
I was confronted by this vessel when I happened to turn on the TV later this week. It was in a programme about divers whose job it was to go under the oil-tanker so that they could examine her hull. The narrator said something about it being important to double-check the safety of such vessels because this nation totally relies on them for most of its oil-based fuel.
It was a monster of a ship - the sort of giant tub you could fit ten football pitches into on 14 different levels. And it was what the narrator said next that floored me… He reckoned the UK needs three of these gargantuan tankers a day!
I do not know how many millions of gallons such a ship can hold, but the fact we burn through the contents of three of these vast floating reservoirs each and every day astounds me. That means more than 1000 tankers a year! You could probably fill the entire English Channel with their contents in under a decade!
That is no drop-in-the-ocean. It is colossal. Geologically colossal. And it only represents our fuel-guzzling habit in the UK! What about the rest of Europe? How many giant tankers, indeed, are delivering the juice of long-dead fossils each year if you are counting the requirements of the entire world?
No wonder the climate is playing up. They say Hurricane Idalia kicked off because of increasingly warm sea temperatures in the Gulf of Mexico, and I’m sure the climatologists are right about that - but another way of looking at it would be to imagine the poor old climate is just coughing itself death.
And here’s me having the gall to say such a thing! The guy who drove his diesel car 180-miles to an airport where he jumped on an aeroplane which burns more kerosene in an hour than my central heating does in years.
At least I didn’t take a half-filled antique gravy-boat with me. That really would be mad.
