Hospital Visit, Travel Through A 'Deserted' Airport - Mother Recalls Harrowing Christmas, But Kids Say 'Best Ever'
Date
12/21/2024 5:00:44 AM
(MENAFN- Live Mint) It was the day of Christmas and author Jenny Colgan was heading to the airport with her three young children after a particularly harrowing hospital visit. The journey promised to be somewhat harrowing - albeit with the promise of a 'joyous reconciliation' with her sailor husband and a Christmas feast on board a bilge.
Colgan had just received bad news while visiting a parent in the hospital and now faced the grim prospect of a flight to France via Schiphol airport in Amsterdam. There was not much to do as the unlikely group spent their five hour layover at the airport.
“Schiphol looked like the aftermath of a mass-extinction event: polished, shining white and utterly, eerily deserted. The escalators were empty and everything was shut. This was going to be awful,” she predicted in an article for The Guardian.
The Doctor Who writer recalls being somewhat shocked to see everything closed for Christmas - with only an“uninspiring bar selling Heineken and Dutch meatballs” available for succor. Meanwhile the three toddlers escorting her were rather excited by the 'adventure' - running backwards, jumping and climbing the travellators and gorging on candy.
“It was dark by the time we made it. Within his tiny quarters on the boat, my husband had done the best he could to string up a single thread of fairy lights and throw together a Christmas dinner that would make the arduous journey worthwhile,” she narrates for The Guardian.
But as her husband waited on board with Christmas dinner - including dozens of unopened oysters - the children insisted that they 'did not want anything to eat'. The weary travellers, one might recall, had played and enjoyed an elaborate diet of“tooth-rotting fizzy pop” over the past few hours.
Colgan recalls bundling the trio and one robot dog into two“very small bunks” with some help from her husband as Christmas drew to a close.
This, one of them informed her sleepily, was“the bestest Christmas ever”.
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