Dear Rest of the World: what has coffee ever done to you? Having just come back from a wonderful trip to the UK and Ireland, I am left to reflect on the fact that one of the few downsides to travel is that Australia is possibly the only place in the world where you can get a decent cup of coffee.
Now, don’t get me wrong – I am not saying coffee in the UK is American-coffee bad, but American coffee is a special case. I suspect it would make a great alternative biofuel, if it wasn’t for the fact that it would probably eat through the fuel tanks of most vehicles in about 12 seconds. If I were to take a guess at the cause of American foreign policy over the years, the coffee would be suspect number one.
That said, UK coffee is still pretty bad – it tastes like it was developed to demoralise German POWs in World War II, but not used because it was found to violate the Geneva Convention. I think that instead of wasting millions sending Chris Bowen, his family, his staff and pretty much everyone he has ever met, to COP 31, the PM should send Australian baristas around the world to show people how to make good coffee. COP negotiations would go much better if people weren’t constantly grumpy.
Other than that, the trip was great, although some problems arose because – due to some massive bureaucratic error – the UK and Ireland are located on the wrong side of the world, so you have to fly to get there.
Thankfully, international flights have improved greatly since I last went to the UK in 1982. That trip took about 35 hours because the plane had to keep stopping to rewind the rubber band, and the food was indistinguishable from the wrapping it came in, and probably less nutritious.
This time, however, it was great: the plane was faster, the flight attendants fantastic, food nice, and the toilets…
Well, the toilets were pretty much the same, in that you’d probably prefer to wait until the plane was over land, grab a parachute and take your chances rather than use them. Whoever designed toilets on aeroplanes was probably also involved in the development of American coffee.
Still, that was a minor quibble and everything was going fine, but I was nervous. The travel gods do not like it when people enjoy travelling, probably because it causes work for them, so they are constantly on the look-out for people having a fun travel experience. I was sitting there, eating nice food, drinking nice wine and watching Lord of the Rings for the 217th time, and trying to look as though I wasn’t enjoying it, so as not to draw attention to myself.
It was all in vain; across the gulf of space, the travel gods vast and cool and unsympathetic, regarded me with envious eyes, and slowly and clearly drew their plans against me…
The first hurdles were the check-in and security procedures before flying, which, in line with the UN Convention to Make Absolutely Everything in the World Very Difficult, are different for every airport. Some require laptops in bags, some out; some will accept water bottles, some don’t; some require you to stand on one leg and hop through the gate with your fingers in your ears.
None would allow my son’s bag through without opening it, because he had a pencil case in there and nobody, in this day and age, recognises an actual pencil. He also had a protractor and a calculator in there, so maybe they were looking for weapons of maths instruction? (sorry).
That was small potatoes compared to our adventures getting from England to Ireland (get it? Ireland? Potatoes? Yeah, they hated me…). To get from Heathrow to Dublin, we left the safe, familiar confines of Qantas and had to use a smaller airline. I will disguise it with the name ‘Air Linger’, partly because it is close to their actual name, and partly because we experienced more linger than air.
When we went to check in there was a slight problem, in that they only had a seat for my wife. Seats for my son and me did not exist, despite us having ticket numbers. As we were trying to sort it out, a couple of stand-by people were allowed on the plane, which seems kind of suspicious, you know?
In any event, we decided my wife would go on ahead and my son and I would linger on the off chance the same kind of happy circumstance that happened to the stand-by fliers getting seats on our plane might happen to us, and we’d get seats on someone else’s plane, purely by coincidence, of course. Of course, because this was not enough to satisfy the travel gods, Air Linger removed my wife’s luggage from the plane, although they did not tell us.
This meant that my wife arrived in Dublin with our luggage, not hers, while my son and I lingered at Heathrow airport (with her luggage, not ours) where even breathing costs about four pounds an hour; my wife could not call us and let us know because we were using international roaming, which doesn’t work internationally.
About three hours later my son and I boarded a plane – with, unbeknownst to us, my wife’s luggage but not ours. When we got to Dublin, my wife had already been picked up by friends of ours, and was finally able to phone me. She could tell from our air tags that her luggage was on our flight and at our terminal, but Air Linger weren’t having that as it was a Sunday arvo and the pubs were open.
So, we decided if you can’t beat them, join them, and our friends picked us up and we all went to the pub. Tune in again next time to find out if we were able to collect my wife’s luggage the next day (spoiler alert: no).
© Shane Budden 2026
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