Return of the pod people

When you're coming off a combination of goodbyes to good friends and a holiday that was more Sicksmas than Christmas, there's nothing like an upgrade to business class to make your 11pm YYZ-LHR flight more enjoyable. Good thing Swiss Mister and Miss are still in the Air Canada Elite good books (for now...). We put on our eye masks, smooshed in our ear plugs, sloshed back a glass of sparkling wine, and then trundled off to dreamland in our pods...

Swiss Miss was a little nervous about returning to the UK, as her EEA Family Permit is still a work in progress, but after giving her fingerprints (???!!!) she sailed through passport control, and both she and the Mister coasted through customs (although the whimsy clock did raise a few eyebrows at security on the way out of town).

The true key to getting home, though, is securing a cab. You'd think that'd be easy at Heathrow, what with the bazillion cabs there. However, we've learned that we live in an unpopular (for Heathrow taxi drivers) part of town. You see, drivers wait in the taxi queue for hours for a fare (ours today had been waiting for five!), and our piddly distance is just far enough to get them out of the line but not far enough to make it worthwhile, so we get refused. The secret? Say you live in Brentford! Brentford fares earn the taxi driver a jump-the-queue spot back in line because of the short distance, and the actual distance to Swiss Mister and Miss town earns the driver more money. And us? We get a ride. Win-Win! Today's exchange went like this:

Taxi marshal: Where are you going?
Swiss Mister: Brentford
[SMandM enter cab, we drive away]
Taxi driver: So, we're going to [Swiss Mister and Miss town], right?

Right. To reward our excellent use of local knowledge, the taxi driver gave us two blank receipts and told us to "use your imagination."

London, we missed you.