I don’t remember much of the flight if I’m honest, apart from wanting water like nobody’s business. You know when all you want is water and nothing else will make you feel better? I was like that for most of the flight. And all they give you is those dumb sippy cup things.

I realised that I’d been spoilt having a window seat on the first leg of the flight so I could curl up against the wall, and having a middle aisle seat isn’t conducive to continued rest – but then, neither are group tours of people who are sitting all over the place and keep moving around to talk to each other. I had wifi on this flight, which was a luxury – It was bizarre to be messaging my mum and a couple of friends while I was literally in the middle of what felt like a very pivotal moment in my life. They were just carrying on theirs like nothing had changed. And it hadn’t, for them.

I did fall asleep on this leg of the flight, and at the time it felt like I’d slept hours. Unfortunately, I still had another 5 to go. That was probably around the point that I got impatient. Patience is the best thing you can have on international flights, but unfortunately I hadn’t learned that lesson yet. I flicked between movies (pretty sure I watched The Wizard of Oz) and the outer cameras on the plane for the remaining 4 hours and it was torturous. I can barely sit through a full movie without getting fidgety – plane flights are not my friends.

Finally though, I saw this

(https://flic.kr/p/AbsXFd)

And around then I started to get nervous.

My mother’s oldest sister, who’s always been my favourite Aunty, was going to pick me up. She’s lived in the UK for over 10 years now, so we haven’t seen her in nearly that long. What if I didn’t recognise her? What if she hated me? What if I was a burden? The last half an hour of that flight I nearly made myself sick.

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I departed the plane in Heathrow to humid London weather. People don’t talk much about when it gets hot in London. While it’s not so bad out at Heathrow, when it gets hot in the city it gets hot. Collecting my bags was surprisingly easy (if nothing else a good arm workout – absolutely didn’t realise I’d packed so much stuff) and it gave me less time to fret about essentially meeting my Aunty again – because I was a kid, the last time I saw her. Wasn’t even  a teenager. Enough stuff has happened (as it does) to make me a completely different person.

She hadn’t changed a bit, aside from letting her hair go salt and pepper over the years. Still looks exactly the same as I remembered her, otherwise. I had no reason at all to worry about anything – she immediately started complaining about how much my mum was trying to get hold of either of us before we’d even left the terminal.

We spent the 4 hour bus trip from Heathrow to Wolverhampton, where she lives with her husband,  making up for lost time. And call it overtiredness or lack of healthy family relationships or whatever you want, but I wanted to cry for some of it. I haven’t felt a connection to anyone in my family for years. We aren’t close, and I have no memory of ever being close with most of them. And in under  5 minutes, even deliriously tired and full of plane fumes and stale air, I suddenly did. Because she just gets it. She knows what I mean as soon as I start saying it, and disagrees with the same things about the rest of the family that I do. I’m not dependent upon people understanding what I say when I tell them my family isn’t close, but having someone who does is mind blowing. It’s not quite a justification but it’s a little bit of vindication that I’ve never had in my adult life.

Aside from that, a truck full of hay caught fire on the motorway in the opposite direction and the cars behind were piled up for hours, so that was an interesting grown up introduction to the UK.