lucky

It's a warm day in late July last year. I'm perched awkwardly on the edge of a chair in Lauryn's back garden, sipping on a G&T while my skin starts to sizzle in the sunlight. We're at T-minus 7 hours until we are due to leave for London on an overnight sleeper train from Motherwell. This warm and snug, but noisy and stuffy overnight train journey, riding coach, would herald the start of the biggest adventure of my life so far. A cross-continental trip of Europe. 10 cities, 4 weeks, 2 friends and a final bill that, to this day, I still haven't actually added up. Not everything looks good on paper. But trips of a lifetime such as this are more important than some arbitrary numbers in a bank account - especially when you're young. There will inevitably come a time when you wish you had said yes to more opportunities in life.

Scott, Lauryn's dad, picked me up from the flat and ran me over to their house for a photoshoot, a few pre-dinner drinks and a quick unwrapping of the Interrail survival kits they had picked up for us both. I'd love to tell you exactly what was in those kits, but in honesty by the time we started unwrapping them, I was already a few double-gins down and was seeing stars! That pretty much set the tone for the evening and trust me when I say, it didn't end all that well! We were finishing off the last of our pre-drinks when Amanda, Lauryn's mum, exclaimed how chuffed she was for us, and how lucky we were to be going travelling.

Sure, I felt lucky to an extent. I had moved house just a few months ago, a change in my living circumstances that most certainly wasn't accounted for when I started saving for this eye-wateringly expensive trip. So given I was able to move out on my own and plant two feet firmly into the ground, as well as continue ahead with this trip made me incredibly thankful that I'm earning a half-decent wage that made it possible. But at the same time, the phrase kind of annoyed me. Partly because I'd been getting it from all angles for about a year by this point! But mostly because, as I say, I earned my way into this position. I earned the money to both move out and fund an amazing European adventure holiday. I'd earned it. I deserved it. And so in that sense, I didn't feel that luck came into it all that much. Not nearly as much as hard work did.

Drinks finished and a table booked for 6 PM, we made tracks for the restaurant. Scott kindly drove us from Hamilton to the Hup Lee Chinese buffet. Swinging the car doors open, belly's rumbling, Scott shouts through the passenger window, "eleven-thirty, Lauryn?" With a thumbs up and a thank you, we made our way inside. We were meeting friends there for a sort of mini leaving drinks. It was only a month of travelling, but we'd often spend a few days a week all together as a group, especially over summer, so it almost felt like we were moving away. Rather embarrassingly, each of them had already arrived and were keen to get in and fed. Bunched up on the couches in the waiting area by the door, we stroll in casually like Charles and Camilla to greet our friends. Naturally, "What time do ye' call this?" preceded niceties and normalities. Still tipsy, we laughed hysterically but knew fine well they were only half joking. Though truthfully I'd have reacted the same if in their shoes, I don't blame them!

I hadn't eaten much all day in preparation for this meal. Mainly since I'd spent most of the day packing. Lauryn was up to high dole night's before trying to get packed on time. Meanwhile, the night before I drank a bottle of red and watched David Attenborough on Netflix without a care in the world. Having not eaten much at all, I hadn't really noticed how hungry I was. This of course always ends in over-eating. But if you don't finish a Chinese meal by paying the bill and rolling out the front door, you are doing it wrong. A plate of starters, several plates of mains and two plates of dessert - sometimes three if there's profiteroles! We then took the short walk round the corner, via a sketchy as shit pedestrian underpass, to the local Wetherspoon's. Ah yes, the natural home of old men talking pub bollocks, sharing their blatant racist opinions and shaking their head disapprovingly at even the most vanilla-flavoured camp boy. But the drink is cheap, so you ignore them.

The night passes as all nights must. Of course when the Scottish drink, we drink to excess, so you won't catch me recalling every conversation from memory. But I distinctly remember my most favourite word of the year coming up again - lucky. Bloody lucky. As much as I'd grown to hate the word, I also never want to seem entitled. So instead I would just nod and agree - "yeah it's gunna' be one for the books, for sure," I'd say. Having spent a year formulating canned responses in my head for the inevitably repetitive questions and comments, I dare say I looked dull and uninterested much of the time. My eagerness to get going only occasionally peaking through when someone would say something to the topic I'd never heard or thought about before.

We leave the pub just before shutting time and take another short walk to the train station, where Lauryn's family were waiting. It always makes me laugh thinking about this. I was at the stage of borderline out-of-order drunk. I'd been drinking since 4 PM by this point, so I thought I was doing well simply by still being awake! But now I was standing on the station platform making small talk with Lauryn's entire family - including her 14-year old brother. For a time he thought Lauryn and I were together, making those sulky teenager type remarks like, 'oh my sister and her boyfriend are going on holiday next month.' Eventually Lauryn, bless her, had to break the news to him that I'm in fact as gay as they come. Even still, I think for a while he thought that was just an elaborate lie. It was after a minute or so of this small talk that our group of friends notice and proceed to laugh at the varying degrees of baggage we had each opted to live with for the next month of our lives. I had kept it simple - two pairs of shoes (one of which I was wearing), one pair of jeans, a shirt, a few pairs of shorts and a few tee-shirts, plus toiletries and enough underwear and socks for 5 days. I knew that regardless of how much we took, we would still need to visit a laundrette, so why carry the kitchen sink in your bag? So when I ticked that last item off my packing checklist and zipped the bag shut, the bag would have fit in the overhead locker of an aeroplane. As it turns out, it was double the weight restriction for carry-on luggage, but that's another story entirely! Lauryn on the other hand, had opted to bring the kitchen sink. She had a large rucksack that people hiking the West Highland Way would wear, plus an extra day sack which was full to the bursting. Ladies tend to pack enough for two outfit changes each day when they are going on holiday. Who knew? Certainly not me, I didn't sign up to being a caddy!

So the train shows up late. Usual - this is Britain after all. It wouldn't be the start of a holiday without a predictably late-running public transport service. I grab my go-bag and a poly bag filled with the Interrail survival kits and four bottles of Corona, which Lauryn's parents had also bought. The doors slide open and I start dishing out goodbye hugs, meanwhile Lauryn was marching up the platform looking for the right coach number. In my haste to catch up, I start running without a proper grip on the poly bag full of glass bottles and smash! I dropped the lot. There's the disaster of an ending I promised! So now there is beer pishing down the station platform toward a train that is already running late and is keen to leave. Lauryn turns back as she is boarding to see this carnage, unsure of whether to laugh or freak out. Wanting to help clean up my mess, but also not wanting to miss the train, I panic! Moments later Amanda appears, "right you go, don't worry! I've got it," and so I leg it down the platform to join Lauryn on the train.

Arses on seats and I'm immediately gutted that I had just said a premature goodbye to the last four beers of the evening, which were still draining down the platform and onto the tracks beneath us. The train departed in the smoothest, most elegant, effortless surge of movement I've ever experienced. So much so that we didn't realise we had started moving until we noticed the conveyor belt of waving hands passing us by through the window. The journey had finally begun. The conductor appears, checked the tickets and started a brief chat, "Off on your holidays then, eh? Lucky for some, enjoy!" and disappeared down the carriage, greeting others and exchanging brief niceties as he went.

Lucky. There it was again. It had been haunting me from the moment we announced plans for the trip, to the moment our first train tickets were stamped. In honesty, it wasn't really until now, more than a year later, that I realise they were all right. We were lucky.

The world has been taking a beating from Coronavirus since November last year. A world brought to it's knees. At the time of writing, there have been 31.8M reported Coronavirus cases worldwide, with the virus claiming 974,000 lives. With the country in lockdown, daily life for most people has changed dramatically, with many loosing their jobs and their livelihoods. The affects of this virus being so exceptional to anything we've ever faced before, that a truly unprecedented package of income support was made available to anyone who had suffered a loss of earnings due to the pandemic. Limited domestic travel running at reduced service to cater primarily for essential workers, plus international travel bans have people loosing thousands on travel arrangements and holiday bookings. A&E departments are full to the bursting with Coronavirus cases, in hospitals that are grossly underfunded and ill-equipped to cope with demand. And whilst there was never any problem with supply chains getting food into shops, panic buying swept the nation on a scale I have never seen before. Getting your hands on the essentials after lunch time was nearly impossible. GDP has plummeted to -20.4, meaning the worst recession since comparable records began in 1955.

In this changed world we live in, it will be a long time yet before we can look around and say that things are back to the way they used to be. While 2019 wasn't the best year for me by any stretch of the imagination, and sure I did deserve the holiday time I took for myself, none of that made me any less lucky to be there.

~ Aedan