If a stranger were to flick through the pages of my passport, I would not blame them for making a number of assumptions. One, that I have a house in Amsterdam, or two that I have a questionable drug habit which requires me to travel there to get the goods on a semi-regular basis. Probably the only thing that appealed to me about Brexit was the reintroduction of stamps in passports from European cities.
There is something satisfying about leafing through the thick premium pages and seeing the different array of emblems inked there to document your foreign travels. But given you only get them when you first arrive in Europe, I don’t have much variety. It’s pretty much all Amsterdam.
As one of the only flights to a major hub remaining from Aberdeen airport, I find myself visiting Schiphol every time I want to leave the country – which is as often as my boss will let me, these days. Today, for instance, I am sitting on a balcony in the south of France debating whether to take the train to Monaco for the afternoon or finish my book on the beach. But in order to make it here I had to take a hop, skip and a jump on multiple planes, trains and automobiles – not exactly plain sailing.
I am very grateful KLM runs so many frequent routes from Aberdeen to the Dutch capital but I can’t help but hanker back to the days before Covid when I was able to step on one plane and end up in Paris in around an hour. So when I heard I was over the moon. Because when we think about it, the b.