Excerpt of Cracks in My Foundation by Marian Keyes

Cheaper Than Drugs

I know a man who denies that jet lag exists. He regularly
flies halfway across the world, marches off the plane
after a twenty-seven-hour flight, goes straight into the
Auckland office, pausing only to brush his teeth, and
immediately starts barking orders and making people
redundant. (Or whatever super-macho, no-human-weakness job
it is he does.) I want to sue this man-as far as I'm
concerned denying jet lag is like denying that the Earth
is round. I am so prone to jet lag that I even get it when
I haven't been on a plane: I get jet lag when the clocks
go back.

(It's because I'm so in thrall to sleep. I'm grand if I
get my habitual sixteen hours a night, but if anything
happens to interfere with that, I'm all over the place. I
am a martyr to my circadian rhythms.)

Naturally, I've investigated all the jet lag "cures" stay
away from alcohol on the plane; drink plenty of water; eat
lightly; do a little exercise; get on to local time
patterns immediately; and most importantly walk around in
the sunlight as soon as you arrive at your faraway
destination.

All nonsense, of course: as effective as giving someone a
Barbie Band-Aid for a shattered femur. I must admit I
don't trust "natural" solutions to conditions; I like
chemicals. I am probably the last person in the Western
world who doesn't have a homeopath and who still swears by
antibiotics. I would love if someone invented an anti-jet
lag drug and I couldn't care less about side effects, in
fact I'd embrace them. Dry mouth? Trembling? Blurred
vision? Better than being fecking jet lagged and falling
asleep facedown in my dinner at six in the evening.

But unfortunately, for some things there is no cure but
time. Like a hangover or a broken heart, you just have to
wait your jet lag out and try to live through it as best
you can.

Of all the suggested "cures" I think that trying to get on
to local time as quickly as possible is probably the best,
but doing it is so phenomenally unpleasant. Walking around
on feet I can no longer feel, swimming through air that
seems lit with little silvery tadpoles, the pavement
lurching towards me -- everything takes on a strange,
hallucinogenic quality. (Mind you, if you're that way
inclined, it'll save you a fortune in recreational drugs.)

In Australia, I had the worst ever example of this. In a
pitiful attempt to recover from a twenty-four-hour flight
and an eleven-hour time difference, myself and Himself
thought we'd "do a little exercise" and "walk around in
the sunlight" as soon as we arrived.

It was early evening, and clutching our bottles of water
("drink plenty of water"), we staggered about on an area
of greenness so verdant that we gradually realized it must
be a golf course. Bumping into each other and grumpily
apologizing, like we were scuttered, I suddenly...

"It is better to travel than to arrive."

Whoever said that should get his head examined. It is NOT
better to travel. To travel is AWFUL and to arrive is
LOVELY.

The only time it's not entirely unbearable to travel is
when you're on the Orient Express, and your daily
champagne allowance would fell an elephant. Or on a cruise
liner the size of a small country, and you're sailing from
place to place but it doesn't feel like it, the same way
you don't feel the Earth turning at four million miles a
day (or whatever it is).

Let's look at how awful it is to TRAVEL, will we? I won't
even mention the car-clogged crawl to the airport, the dog-
eat-dog scramble for parking, and the overland trek from
the long-stay car park to the departures hall. (All I'll
say is that I've heard frequent travelers discussing the
feasibility of paying homeless people to sleep in a space
in the short-term car park, so that it'll be reserved for
them when they need it.)

Anyway... Having arrived at departures but already lost
the will to live, I look up at the telly monitors
wondering where I should check in. But I needn't bother
overexerting my neck muscles by looking up. All I need to
do is look in, at the rowdy, pushing, shoving mass of
humanity spilling out into the set-down area. It might
look like a riot at a Red Cross feeding station but
actually it's a queue. A queue filled with shrieking
babies all sporting ear infections, overexcited teenage
boys, playfully breaking each other's limbs, and greasy
long-haired men wanting to check in rocket launchers and
garden sheds. Step right this way, Miss Keyes!

For many, many hours I shuffle, far too slowly for any
movement to be visible to the naked eye, and because --
through no fault of my own -- I'm one of the last to check
in, all the good seats are gone. I'm usually told it's not
possible for the left side and right side of my body to
sit together, so one half of me is in 11B and the other in
23E.

Then I proceed to security in order to be groped and to
display the contents of my brain on a little table. (Okay,
security checks are a very good thing, I'm just sore
because recently I was relieved of one of my finest
tweezers in a handbag search. Very expensive they were
too, something people don't seem to realize about
tweezers. They think they only cost a couple of euro, but
mine cost eighteen quid. Sterling.)

The security check eventually comes to an end, and when
I've replaced my internal organs in something
approximating their correct configuration, I proceed to
the gate -- just in time for the delay!

Now the thing is, I expect delays, I don't even mind them
(apart from when I miss my connecting flight to
Mauritius). I've learned to embrace them in a Zen kind of
way -- why resent them?