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I’m sure I would like air travel if I had a personal jet. It’s not that I dislike flying with other people, it’s just…OK, it IS that I don’t like flying with other people. Especially on chartered flights.
How many of us have boarded our holiday flight full of excitement about our two weeks in the sun only to have to spend three hours in the company of a squealing baby, a drunken stag party and a teenager tapping out the rhythm of the hip-hop tune blaring from his headphones. Sounds familiar? I thought so.
Scheduled flights tend to be better, but not by much. It used to be that a scheduled flight gave you more leg room and a quieter cabin companion, but with the advent of EasyJet, RyanAir, et al, this is no longer guaranteed.
Even leaving aside all these ‘first world pains’ about air travel, I do have a more personal reason for not being keen on flying.
In 1988 my friend Pamela and I went to Sorrento on holiday. It was an evening flight and I had been busy all day, running around like the proverbial headless chicken. Shortly after take-off I began to feel a bit ‘off’. I nudged my friend. ‘Pamela, I think I’m going to fai…’ Next thing I knew I had a stewardess wafting smelling salts under my nose and redundantly asking me if I was OK. Yes, I had passed out. But I began to feel better, assured the stewardess I was fine and apologised to those around me.
Then dinner was served. Ever the optimist, I took the tray and began to tuck in to the beef stew. It was lovely, as far as airline food goes and I enjoyed it for all of 2 minutes before I began to feel unwell again. I passed out for a second time and when they had brought me round, a few passengers were asked to move so I could spend the rest of the flight lying down across three seats with my feet higher than my head, resting on the fuselage.
My humiliation gets worse.
We took a trip to Rome – a four hour coach ride with a stop at a service station half-way. In the queue for the toilets we got talking to an older couple. ‘Where are you from?’ they asked us.
‘We flew in from Glasgow.’
‘Oh, did you hear about that young girl on the Glasgow flight two days ago? Apparently she kept fainting. Everyone was talking about it.’
So when the day comes I can afford my own private jet, I’ll start to like flying again.
And only if there is an on-board fainting couch.
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