THIS is the longest jetlag I’ve ever had, and I am enjoying every moment of it.
In my youth, or as we would say in Singlish “when young time”, I reveled in my jetlag. Those sleepless hours in the night, when everyone was sleeping, were the best time for writing – no interruptions bar the occasional whimpering of my dog dreaming of his playtime. I got a lot of good work done, thanks to jetlag.
As the years caught on, it got harder and longer to recover and ironically, the last app purchase I made at the end of 2019, after a crazy bout of travelling, was the jetlag app, Timeshifter. Unfortunately, I only got to test it on two trips – so I cannot say for sure that it worked – but it would notify me at certain times to expose myself to light, which can be hard when you’re in a darkened cabin of a plane.
My editor-in-arms Arnie Weissmann of Travel Weekly swears by a pair of glasses he wears which makes him look like an alien when it glows but then, he’s used to attention.
There is a theory that it takes one day for every hour for the body to get back to normal (old normal, not new normal). So by that yardstick, I should be well over my jetlag from Europe by now – it’s been more than 10 days since my return – but that theory doesn’t seem to be holding up this time.
This week, I missed two late morning calls – literally slept through them, despite my three personal assistants, Siri, Google and Alexa – and I was honest in my apology. “Sorry, jetlag,” I said, and was promptly forgiven. Pre-pandemic, this would be frowned upon – so undisciplined, so rude, so unprofessional – but now it’s empathy tinged with maybe a smidgen of envy.
“Jetlag. Wow. What does that feel like?,” asked one.
Truly, having jetlag these days is like a badge of honour because travelling is akin to going into battle – you need to have full armour. Besides paperwork, you need nerves of steel. There is so much anxiety about – will the rules change while I am out, will I be stuck, can I come home? What if I got Covid while I am abroad? What if I get a positive and can’t get on my flight?
Conversations these days are peppered with such war stories – a business executive I know who travelled on the Bangalore-Singapore Vaccinated Travel Lane had a positive supervised-ART test the day before his flight. He promptly took another ART which was negative and his PCR test also came back negative. But imagine the hours while he waited for his PCR test result – what should he tell everyone he met the day before? Meanwhile, his flight had taken off and by the way, the rules changed while he was in Singapore – now he has to serve quarantine on return whereas when he left, quarantine was not a necessity. “If I had known, I wouldn’t have come,” he told me.
Clearly those who make and change the rules willy-nilly don’t travel like normal people – they probably have private jets and private lanes so they don’t know what it’s like for the foot soldier on the ground. That’s why they can have private parties at 10, Downing Street, while some of us drown in paperwork, tests, passes and uncertainty.
Stephan Ekbergh, CEO of Travelstart, a self-professed “freedom fighter”, calls every traveller a “defiant soldier”.
IATA forecasts that 2.3b “defiant soldiers” will fly this year – which is not a bad number considering the Sodom-and-Gomorrah headlines we keep getting in our news feed. Okay, that’s down from the 4.5b in 2019 but when you think about it, there’s still a lot of defiance out there. The forecast number for 2022 is 3.4b – so another billion more of us are expected to take to the skies and take jetlag in our stride than this year.
I know it’s not the best ending to the year we could have asked for – this new Omricon scare that we all going through collectively – but I feel we have all become so jaded that we are learning to live with it and get around it.
Because life has to go on. Families have to be visited. Holidays have to be had. Friends have to be reunited.
This week, I got messages such as these.
“I made it to Mauritius despite all my friends telling me not to go. What a fantastic trip.”
“I am hopping on a plane, see you in 12 hours.”
“Bags safely checked and through customs… woohoo! Feels a bit giddy, we had to filter out a lot of noise.”
“Breaking news. I am going home for Christmas. See you sometime in 2022.”
Jetlag, bring it on.
• Featured image credit: Getty Images
