It was my wife’s idea: to escape Christmas by going someplace they don’t have it. She found cheap flights and whipped up sufficient enthusiasm among our three sons to persuade them to pay for their flights. We’d all spend Christmas together, in Morocco.
The only thing guaranteed to make me feel more anxious than Christmas itself is travelling at Christmas, but everything has been organised by my wife well in advance. I begin to relax by thinking of all the yuletide stuff I would not have to deal with.
Then one evening, around the time we would normally be arguing about whether it was too early to buy a tree, my wife comes downstairs wearing a hard-to-read expression.
“So last week I got this email saying our outgoing flight time had been changed,” she says.
“By how much?” I say.
“A couple of hours,” she says. “But what I didn’t notice was that the date had also changed.” She holds out her phone so I can read the email.
“Three days?” I say.
“Three days later,” she says.
“What’s the point of that?” I say. “We won’t even miss Christmas. By the time we’ve unpacked, it’ll be time to come home.”
“The thing is,” she says, “I clicked Accept.”
I go and find my laptop. The middle one, who is sprawled on the sofa, pulls out his phone. The three of us begin a largely overlapping investigation of flight times, alternative routes and terms and conditions.
“There just isn’t another flight,” my wife says. “Apart from two days before, which is double the price.”
“What’s the next-closest airport? ” I say. “We can drive the rest of the way.”
An atmosphere of panic descends, and eventually subsides. It turns out there are a number of options – giving up among them – but they all depend on what the airline will agree to.
“It should be fine,” I say. “But we can’t do anything now.”
“What do you mean ‘we’?” my wife says.
“You didn’t know what you were accepting,” I say. “How can clicking on a button be legally binding?”
“Feel free to make these arguments yourself,” she says.
“It’s not even a real button,” I say.
Late the next morning my wife comes down to my office. She looks pale, and her arms are tightly folded.
“Well that didn’t go well,” she says.
“What did they agree to?” I say.
“They wouldn’t agree to anything,” she says. “He just kept saying, ‘You clicked Accept’.”
“Not even flying to a different airport?” I say.
“He was also the rudest person I’ve ever spoken to,” she says. “I’m still shaking.”
My wife recounts some of the highlights of the conversation for me. She said: but this will ruin Christmas for five people. He said: it is you who have ruined Christmas.
“So I told him I was a journalist and was going to write about this,” she says.
“But you’re not a journalist,” I say.
“I know, but you are,” she says.
“Yes, but I’m not going to …”
“And then, I’m afraid, I shouted fuck you and put the phone down.”
“I see.”
“I expect they’ll have a recording of that,” she says. “For training purposes.”
“They may do,” I say. “I’d pay to hear it.”
“Anyway I can’t call them back, in case I get the same person. So I’ll have to think about what to do next.”
We have a brief, tricky conversation about sunk costs, unforeseen expenses and the galling possibility of going on half a Christmas break - the half that doesn’t include Christmas.
“Don’t forget to factor in the cost of the tree and the turkey we’ll probably have to get now,” I say.
“Ugh, turkey,” she says.
When I next see my wife she is at her own desk. Several windows are open on her computer screen, all of them different airline websites.
“There are other flights,” she says, quietly, clicking one of the windows.
“Whoa,” I say. “Is that one-way?”
“I can’t ask the boys to pay for new tickets,” she says. “I’m the one who clicked Accept.”
“Yeah, but even if you hadn’t clicked on it, there still wasn’t a good …”
“Leave me,” she says. “I’m not going to decide until I’m in less of a rage.”
I back out of the room, thinking: I should probably get a tree, just in case.
