The Prodigal Returns

Going out to the airport is always a little stressful. One seems in unknown territory and yet you have to be fairly precise, arrival times, access to parking, and finding the car in the car park seem in retrospect easy enough but with the pressure of people and traffic, mistakes are easy made.
Gatwick Airport is a new new testing ground for me to go and pick someone up and last night it was not just someone but Andrew having been away for four years in Australia. That's as special as it gets so apart from tidying the house and making beds I needed to go to the shop. 

The car battery was dead as a door nail, oh oh is this the portent for an obstacle course !!
Having got the car started the dreaded M25 was up to its usual tricks with the 'sat nav' announcing "traffic event ahead" but where. Over the Dartford Crossing which recently change its Toll paying procedure to "on line", having done away with the convenience of paying as you come off the bridge. I don't know how someone without the internet copes, I suppose the traffic fines pile up behind the door,
Arriving in the fading light with eyesight that is not as good as it used to be in the dark, choosing the correct lane for short stay parking was my next mission. I missed it and found myself penned into a corral for buses. I could see the lane which I needed but there was a barrier between me and it. Bugger this, I turned the car around and drove back down the segregated lane, "in opposition to the traffic" and did a U turn into the lane I needed. On coming traffic were somewhat startled and no doubt, caught on a traffic camera, I will be the talking point of airport police but what the hell !
Gatwick is not as modern as Heathrow which itself is not as modern as most of the major airports around the world but then we are in a sticking plaster country where decisions are hampered by protest and indecision
The International Incoming gate was a scruffy affair, somewhat I keeping with the passengers trooping out. There was a time when people dressed up to travel but in these times it seems the fashion to appear as scruffy as possible. Maybe they were the homeless immigrants we've heard so much about.
There he was looking amazingly relaxed after a 25 hour flight, not scruffy, weightier than when he left but confident. We had a bear hug and then off to find the car and the traffic, homeward bound at last.

After the 'telling off' I received when I went to pick up Marie and Angela from Heathrow and forgot which parking bay I was in, this time I took a photo with my smart phone just in case. Perhaps it was the cool heads of "two men" but I retraced my steps without a falter.
I'd forgotten what it was like to have a Vegan in the house, "no this and no that". "That's bad for you and you should only eat this if you want to live longer". The question of what 'that life' is like without a sausage never gets aired !!
In the kitchen he had a run through my tins and packets already and thrown the must be used by 2013 out into the bin, apparently I had a toxic cocktail of goodies but he doesn't understand that I come from an era where if it didn't smell rancid you ate it. You cut the mould off what ever and ate it. You rarely threw away food, it was not a disposable to be treated lightly and the immune system coped with what ever you threw at it. If it was really bad you vomited, the bodies natural default position when you weren't kind to it.
The "A team" are arriving soon from Swansea and the temperature is sure to rise a notch or two as old sibling rivalries flare up and battle commences or the under laying "I'm the parent even if you are nearing 40" !!