Landlady: Man in a suitcase

I am sitting in the shop in the Pier awaiting the inundation of foreign students who’ve just gone up one side of the Pier, waving new fivers like they grow them on a tree in their back garden. One good thing about Brexit is that the UK is now a reasonably priced destination for tourists and I’ve never never seen the Pier so busy.

For the most part, foreign students are much more polite than our British customers, always saying ‘hello’ when they enter the shop, unlike their British counterparts, who will go to great lengths to avoid eye contact, until of course they want to ask one of their inane questions, such as “where is Brighton Pier?”. Absolutely true, I swear. Although The Big Daughter fielded that particular gem on her shift.

Stupid questions aside, my main bugbear is when someone innocently tells me to ‘have a nice day’, an impossibility in a place where people spend all day asking inane questions, or farting stealthily in the shop, then leaving us with the stench. I know they probably mean well, but strangers telling me to ‘have a nice day’ is enough to bring my blood to boiling point and beyond.

It would be easier to teach a cat to make a Mojito than to ever get him to learn how to pack sparingly

Meanwhile, I have more pressing issues at hand, which is now juggling the various hold-bound suitcases of The Cuban, which between here, Scandinavia, Turkey and Cuba is a complex issue. Yes, I’ve tried to train him to adopt my own well honed methods of canny hand luggage, but it would be easier to teach a cat to make a Mojito than to ever get him to learn how to pack sparingly. His big suitcase accompanies him wherever he goes and is often half-empty, but I’ve learned to grit my teeth and accept it.

In a complicated triple-salchow of a manoeuvre, I am soon to travel to Scandinavia empty-handed, to return with a hold suitcase full of stuff for The Cuban to take to Cuba in July, as he’s travelling directly from Scandinavia to Turkey, before returning to Brighton, then directly to Cuba. And you want me to have a nice day?!