Nat Locke: small group travel in Turkey has led to a startling realisation that I’m the Late One

I am currently on a small group tour somewhere in Turkey and I have come to a startling realisation.

I am the Late One.

(Insert shocked gasp here)

It is the smallest of group tours, by the way, with there being just the four of us. But whenever there is a meeting time given, I am always the last to show up. Everyone else is always standing around waiting for me, and it’s making me feel uncomfortable.

In my defence, I’m not late in the sense that I’m turning up after the appointed time. But I am late in the sense that I’m the last to arrive. Every single time.

One morning, when we were leaving Istanbul early to avoid the traffic, I got to the hotel lobby several minutes early and finally thought I’d beaten the others, because there wasn’t a soul in sight. That’s because they were all patiently waiting for me on the bus already. What time were these people getting up?

Being the habitually Late One is quite new territory for me. I have a friend who is famously late for everything, and it drives us all nuts. We started telling her an earlier time so she might turn up remotely close to the appointed time, but it’s like she had a sixth sense for what we were doing and naturally adjusted to being even later. Whenever we called her to find out how close she was, she would always be “just parking” which we all knew was a blatant lie.

Then there was the friend who was supposed to be meeting a bunch of us for lunch. We patiently waited for her to arrive before we placed our order because we’re a considerate bunch like that. She finally arrived 45 minutes late and promptly informed us that she wasn’t going to order anything because — and I kid you not — she had just eaten. That’s right. She was late to lunch because she was eating lunch.

Everyone is late from time to time, of course. There are legitimate reasons, such as there was an accident on the freeway or your neighbour invited you over for champagne or you couldn’t find one of your shoes because your dog needed to put it in the garden when you weren’t looking. All very good reasons (and true, sadly). But if someone is ALWAYS late, it can get very irritating very quickly.

It’s the feeling that their time is more important than yours that really grates, and it’s even worse if you’re a bit hangry and they’re “just parking” for 20 minutes. I once went cycling with friends in France and every night we would agree on a time to depart the next morning and every morning three of us would meet in the lobby at the appointed time, while my friend’s husband took the appointed time to mean he should start doing his 40-minute stretching regime. That got pretty annoying, or assez ennuyeux as the locals would say. Even when we tried to explain that if we had agreed to leave at 10am, a good time to do some stretches would be 9:15am, he failed to grasp the concept. We spent a lot of time sitting in chateau lobbies, which doesn’t sound so bad, but gets tedious after a while.

I am aware that “time blindness” is a thing, however. It can be a symptom of ADHD and is the inability to sense how much time has passed and how much time is required to get things done. I first heard about it in an outraged online news story where a girl in a job interview asked if there would be any consideration given for her time blindness. The potential employer responded with a bemused “What now?” (I maybe be paraphrasing, but you get the drift).

And while I’m fairly sure I’m not suffering time blindness, I am somewhat horrified to be pigeonholed as the slightly chaotic one who everyone else is always waiting for. I guess it’s better than being the weird one — that would be the almost retired accountant Brian, who confessed on the second night that he enjoys a bit of recreational taxidermy and proceeded to show us photos of what’s normally underneath a fox’s skin. Fox innards, if you’re wondering. Not the greatest viewing over dinner. But at least Brian turns up on time.