Mullocker's Travels #2

I returned to the airport. The fetid mass of people, their glazed expressions and unrefined trolley-pushing a vision of supermarket purgatory, assailed my sensitive disposition and almost made me turn back. Valuable insight gleaned: transport hubs are often crowded with people, some of whom are smelly. I wrote this insight on the back of a map of South America, somewhere near where Japan would be if the map were a globe. I used a blunt B4 pencil just in case the map really was a globe and my depth perception had been affected by my sock-hat.

I was wearing a sock-hat because I had no more room in my satchel. The sock hat consisted of 14 pairs of socks, the ankle ends all tied together in a bun with masking tape and elastic bands, the toe ends splayed out in each direction like the tentacles of a 28-legged cotton octopus. This was variously described as "weird" (little girl), "stu-pah" (local street urchin), "can we take picture" (recently arrived Japanese tourists) and "a blatant contravention of the spirit of the 'one item of carry-on luggage per person' rule" (man in sweet shop).

I decided to get on the next plane to anywhere beginning with a particular letter of the alphabet. I devised a scheme to give each letter an equal chance of being chosen, with a knock-out tournament of rock-paper-scissors, beginning with matchups of pairs of consecutive letters, until one was left. However, it became apparent towards the end of round 2 that 26 is not an appropriate number for this system, so a decision was made to make the twelve least frequently used letters engage in a series of preliminary rounds, competing for two available places in the last 16. My mission to discover the twelve least frequently used letters of the alphabet will begin shortly in the airport bookshop, to which I am presently headed.