Day 1

02.45 am. Alarm call. Ate slices of toast. Drank coffee. Brushed teeth. Looked at kids for a silent goodbye. Phonecall to meet taxi. Met Claire Ryan (production manager, Liberty Films) for the first time, along with Julian and Andy.

03.15 a.m, Bewley's Hotel, Dublin Airport. Waiting outside hotel to film Tara leaving with her mother and teacher. Cold, nervous, sleep deprived, jittery. We see a random person vomiting outside, nerves before flying. She was not one of us.

4.00 a.m. Tara emerges, apprehensive, what have we let ourselves in for? Into the taxi, off to the Airport.

04.15 am. Dublin Airport, Departures. Seething with people, I've never seen it so busy. St. Patrick's and Easter weekends back to back, Six Nations Ireland vs England at Twickenham, people flying all over the place for skiing and spring breaks. Queues everywhere, tension mounting, nerves jangling. Pick up a few exterior and interior shots of the departures lounge to set the scene.

04.30 am. The rest of the Self Help group start appearing in Departures. Comprised of two leaders, eleven teachers and fourteen students of transition year and leaving cert ages. Plus us four makes a group of thirty one.

06.45 am. Flight to London, first chance to sit down and, well, relax is the wrong word, but calm down. Claire and Andy manage to travel business class. This particular stigma stays with them for the duration of the trip. Arrived in Heathrow without incident. There's a long lay-over in Heathrow due to shortage of Dublin-London flights.

08.00 am. Because we have four hours to kill, we decide that it's a great idea to go into London for a few hours. Julian, Andy and myself go on a relationship-building-exercise and hare off into London on an Underground express service. Andy is a natural wit and makes a travelogue with his mobile, which must make it up onto YouTube sometime in the future. We see Trafalgar Square, Buckingham Palace, the Changing of the Guard, red London buses, the London Eye, the Tate Modern and Hyde Park. There's a large crack in the floor of the Tate Modern, a conceptual piece by Doris Salcedo called Shibboleth. I don't know whether it's me or the crack, but I have an uncontrollable urge to straddle it. Julian obliges by taking a picture.

We have breakfast. We have falafel. We do London, we drink water. We sight-see, we walk the South Bank, we talk. We have coffee. Then we have beer. We head to Paddington to catch our train back to Heathrow.

There's a security alert and all trains have been cancelled to Heathrow.

Panic!

We need to get to Heathrow, but how? We jump into a cab and head west, promptly getting embroiled in a traffic jam with all the traffic headed to Twickenham for England vs Ireland in the Six Nations. Shit! Time is getting tight and we're getting nervous. The beers we had earlier are taking their course and bladders are getting precipitous. Damn! The pain.

Finally we pass the Twickenham traffic and move freely out to Heathrow. Lesson learnt.

Use the toilet before hopping a taxi, or don't go to London before an international flight.

13.20 pm, our flight departs for Addis Ababa. We crew are suitably embarrassed about the London escapade, but on balance it was worth it, no harm done and considerable enjoyment was had. Except for the taxi bit.