It’s that time of year again when the famous five go on holiday. FYI, try to stick it until at least blog 3, as that is a jaw-dropping belter.

It was a very cold, dark night in Southport when we booked it, and in fact, Karen wasn’t even with us because she had a stinking cold and had lost her voice. We had identified a place about 30 minutes away from Malaga Airport, which looked ideal. Over the course of the evening, we sent messages back and forth with the owner (who was actually an agent for the letting company; let’s call him Pedro to protect the innocent), about the important things in life, namely, whether beach towels were included.

Suitably satisfied with our response, we booked our flights and villa, and we were set to go.

We were due in Malaga around lunchtime, so we contacted the owner again to ask whether we could drop our cases off, go and do the big shop and then check in at 5 pm as stated on the website. (At this point, I was going to do a link to other blogs about “the big shop” but discovered that if you simply Google “big shop”, it pretty much finds one of my previous blogs anyway.)

Pedro replied and said that they had to “restore” the house (we rather hope this was just a bad translation and meant they had to clean the house), so they would get back to us and let us know. We kept pushing this question, but he was getting a bit elusive about coming back to us. At the weekend, Tibu rang and left a message for him, and he asked that all communication be made via the Booking.com website, which we duly did, this time in Spanish. This is all a bit annoying, as we had a shopping list ready to go, but not too worrying.

On the morning of the flight, we were picked up at the unearthly hour of 4:45 am. It was only the night before that I checked what time the sun rises these days, and I realised we were going to be picked up in the dark. It never seems quite right being picked up to go on your summer holidays in the dark, but that’s the joy of flying in September.  The journey and dropping off the car were very uneventful, as was checking in. We had managed to cram 24 kg of our 26 kg allowance into our case, but to be fair, 1 kg of that was vegan cheese, which wouldn’t be coming back with us.

Tibu had got fast track with the car hire, and we sailed through security in minutes. In fact, we got through so fast, I was tempted to go back out again to go to the other security to queue to see how long that one was, because the Airport was quiet. I mean, really quiet. It was almost as if the kids had gone back to school that day.  Oh, hold on…

We headed into the duty-free zone as Nikki and Karen wanted to pick up perfumes. Nikki has done this a few times, where she has pre-ordered it, and Karen said that she should, as she wanted two bottles. I said they were bound to have two bottles of it, it’s duty-free. They always have loads of everything, and to be honest, it sometimes takes Nikki longer to pick something up than it does to go and retrieve it from the shelf. Karen begrudgingly agreed, and so we went to find her perfume. There was only one bottle on the shelf, and of course, they didn’t have any more. Andrew 0 Karen 1. Nik then went to pick up her perfume, but realised she hadn’t received a confirmation email and therefore hadn’t reserved it at all. Luckily, there were loads of her perfume on the shelf, so she bought that quicker than usual.

We went to our usual place for breakfast, and since it was between 6 am and 7 am, we seemed to have hit the techno hour. We enjoyed our breakfast whilst our eardrums were being pounded by the sound of dance music so loud that we couldn’t have a conversation. (How old do I sound!  Don’t answer that.)

Those of you familiar with Manchester Airport (this is probably at all Airports, to be honest) will be aware that outside many restaurants, they have a big screen displaying, on average, how long the food takes to arrive. It doesn’t bode well for the quality of the food when they tell you that from the time of placing an order to them serving it could be as quick as seven minutes. 

The problem was that the board with the timings was right in my eyeline. It doesn’t matter if there is a screen on in a bar or a restaurant, I will look at it. If it’s directly behind the head of the person that I’m with, I will still look at it whilst talking to them. It doesn’t matter if it’s showing news, sport, or a soap opera. It doesn’t matter if it’s in English or a language I do not understand; I cannot help but look at it. So of course, in the 11 minutes that we were waiting for our food to arrive, I kept looking at this board and noticed how the timing kept changing. When we walked in it was 11 minutes. Having sat there for a few minutes, it went up to 14 minutes. A couple of minutes later, it went down to 7 minutes. Now me being the sad man that I am, I began counting the number of people coming in and the number of people going out. They pretty much evened each other out, so this variation of up to 8 minutes between times must, I assume, be due to the speed of the kitchen staff. Or perhaps this sign is really just a PowerPoint slideshow randomly showing times to make people feel better and bears no resemblance to the real time that it takes for the food to arrive anyway.

Once finished, with full bellies and deafened ears, we made our way to find our gate. Obviously, me going via the gents. The thing was that the gents were out of order and had a barrier across it, so I just nipped to the disabled toilet. Whilst I was waiting for the disabled toilet, I noticed three men standing by the closed gents, simply waiting. I have no idea what they thought was going to happen. The toilets were obviously completely unoccupied, there was nobody doing any work on them, and yet I think they thought if they just waited long enough, then the barrier would be removed, and they could go and relieve themselves. When I reappeared out of the disabled toilet, they seemed to have moved on, presumably to find a working toilet, or they may have just rushed through the barricade and were using the toilets in whatever state of repair they happened to be in.

The gate was called, and we made our way to it. When we got on the plane, we did all think it was a little bit warm but didn’t really pay too much attention to that. It was only when the pilot came on the Tannoy and apologised for the noise coming from the right side of the plane (which to be honest, I hadn’t noticed a noise), as the auxiliary power unit wasn’t working, and so they were hooked up to the mains to jump-start the engines. Never have you seen an entire plane look so scared so quickly.

Now I’m a bit of a geek (no, really, I am, I know I hide it really well, but I really am), and I have read a book about planes, so I know all about the auxiliary power on an Airbus. Basically, it’s a bit of the plane which, when it’s on the land and the jet engines aren’t running, keeps things ticking over, such as air-conditioning, lights, instrument panels, etc, until the jet engines start running. It’s like the 12 V car battery you have in your car. So, what they were effectively saying was that that wasn’t available, so they were going to jumpstart the plane. Obviously, once we’re in the air, the fact that the auxiliary power isn’t working makes no difference, but it is not the best thing for a nervous flyer to hear that a bit of the plane is not working.

Once in the air, everything seemed to be working okay. No strange noises, nothing fell off, and we landed ahead of schedule in Malaga. As we were departing the plane (or deplaning, as they call it these days), we heard an announcement that I had never heard before. They requested that we close the window blinds to keep the plane cool, as the auxiliary power was not working. Presumably, they were then waiting for El AA to come and jump-start them to get the plane running so they could fly home. Once inside the airport, we walked for what felt like miles until we eventually reached passport control. Tibu waltzed through the EU citizens’ lane, and the four of us queued. To be honest, it wasn’t too bad, we were through quite quickly, and when we got through, there was Tibu with three cases, and judging by the odour, one of which still seemed to have the 1 kg of vegan cheese intact. With this, we headed out towards the hire car, and that’s when the day began getting really, really interesting.