The Old Timer

Hammered this short story into the laptop back on the evening of the 11th of April I think, after a flight to Auckland.  Mum and I had flown up for Uncle Robbie's 70th, and we were staying at my mate's family's place.  This isn't much of a story, but I think it's fairly interesting.  Better by far (if you ask me), is the story I wrote about a young family in the departure lounge in Christchurch who were waiting for the same flight we were.  Anyway, here's the story - forgive me, I never finished it.

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8B, there it was, my seat, in between two non-diminutive elderly ladies. Equally non-diminutive and ageing were two men sitting either side of seat 9B, the seat allocated on Mum's ticket. By instinct as it were, diverse and complicated calculations in my head, I pointed out to Mum her new seat, 8B. The gentleman in the aisle seat of row nine on the left side of the plane looked like a good keen man. I made eye-contact and gestured towards the middle seat. Almost disbelievingly, he asked “are you sitting here?”. Yeah, might be good. For some unknown reason my fellow-traveler couldn't quite comprehend the situation. I handed him the laptop with the biography of Lord Nelson sitting on it, and asked him to put it on the seat.

I turned and made use of the empty over-head baggage rack on the other side of the plane. Surprisingly, I had no trouble fitting the two oversized pieces of hand-luggage into the compartment, and momentarily raised my hand to close the compartment door but remembering that, no, the guys do that.

“How's it going?” I turned to the man sitting beside me, in the aisle seat. Heavily built and about 5'8”, the top two buttons of his red Swandri shirt were undone, “Big day... we hit the turps pretty hard last night”...