London, United Kingdom
Mon 14th May: Ever had that sinking feeling, the heart-stopping realisation that a cock up of quite monumental proportions has happened? Of course you have. It's the cold-sweat time, the head-tightening moment of fear we've all experienced. And as I sit on the Heathrow Express gliding into London with Monday morning rain hitting the windows of the train, leafing through the Shanghai guidebook I bought a few days ago, that sensation hits me fair and square.
Visas! We've not got the right bloody visas!! We leave in three days time and the promoter who's organising the trip has screwed up big style and not organised the correct entry visas for us. I phone our usual travel agency and ask them to clarify - do we, as the promoter claimed, fill in entry visas on the plane? Or do we need them issued in advance by the Chinese embassy? As I fear, it's the latter, and our travel agency tell me it will be 99% impossible to turn them round at such short notice.
A swift call to the manager of Sacred Mother Tongue, the band who I'm accompanying to China, ensues. It transpires that we're all in the same position and a frantic afternoon of finding a visa company who can do a 48 hour turnaround is followed by forms being emailed left right and centre, passports being ferried from one end of the country to another and additional photos being taken of worried faces in Snappy Snaps from Sunderland to Norwich to London to affix to the last minute visa applications.
My expectation of popping into the office for a few hours and then going home for a jet-lagged snooze after a sleep-free flight back from the US has been shot down in flames. So it's with a sleep-deprived groan that the alarm wakes me at 6.30am on Tuesday morning so I can race down to the 5 Star Chinese Travel agency on Regent Street with passports for me and my travelling companions - the ever-entertaining John McMurtrie and Alexander Milas - ready for it to open its doors at 8.30am.
Poor Coman. I've been away for the past five days and all he gets is a rushed and stressed breakfast with me before I'm racing off again. But when I meet Kirsty from SMT's management office I find out she's managed just two hour's sleep having been the one haring round the country collecting signed paperwork, passports and photos from the band.
We hand everything over to David behind the counter who painstakingly checks all our credentials and, after almost two hours as we wait for hotel confirmations to be emailed over from China, he eventually confirms everything is in order. We now have a nail-biting 48 hours to wait as they deliver them to the Embassy, get approved by the authorities and returned on Thursday morning at 10.30am. This is going to be tight as the band have to be checked in at Heathrow by midday!!
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Thursday 17th May, 9.30am, bags packed I sit in the coffee shop next door to Mosley House on Regent Street, home of the visa agency. Kirsty joins me and we sip coffee until we see a courier arrive and enter the door. We follow him in, but turns out he's not delivering our passports. The clock ahead of us ticks away, every minute reminding us that we're cutting it fine. At 10.14am a Chinese lady appears and out of her shoulder bag produces nine passports.
Within seconds we're rifling through each one, checking that the visas have all been issued and off we can go. Just nine happy-go-lucky tourists who have decided at the last minute to go on a sightseeing trip to China. Not a musician or writer in sight, oh no...
Profuse thanks are offered as we run out of the door, hop on a tube to Paddington and run through the closing doors of the Heathrow Express to Terminal 5. Kirsty and I arrive in super quick time and hook up with a relieved looking band, sound engineer and tour manager who are all in the BA check-in queue, ready to go.
Hasty introductions are made as this is my first time meeting them and soon they're ushered through security and away they go. "See you in Shanghai!" I call after their retreating backs.
Then it's straight over to Terminal 3 to meet John and Alex, check in our bags, grab a sandwich, change some money into Chinese yuan and board the Virgin plane to Shanghai. And at last we're up, up and away and heading to China. It's been the closest of calls!
