The Wright brothers, Pan Am, plane travel in all its glory, the conquering of the skies. When my mother flew to New York on Concorde in the late 70s the word she used was thrilling. As the cabin crew took their seats for landing on Lufthansa flight LH0511 in early September, by now in acute deep vein thrombosis, I fumbled around in the seat pocket in front of me for a word to capture what careening through the outer atmosphere for the last thirteen hours sat in a metal tube had done for me.
Ordeal, seemed about right.
*
I’m a last minute man making last minute plans.
British focus built empires, but a flair for the spontaneous, prowess on the dancefloor, three world cups and some hyper-inflation, look no further than the south american blood coursing through my veins. If someone invited me over for dinner next week I would throw a merengue’d arm up in consternation, proclaim who even knew if they’d be alive in a week.
This same DNA required my presence on ludicrously long-haul flights at least once a year. Off to those parched deserts of sedate bovine congregations, of long sunsets, beautiful girls bringing tea to tranquil terraces. Argentine pastoral. Which also required me to book a plane ticket.
We all have areas of expertise, booking a plane ticket is not one of mine. In the same way friends might pick my brains on an off the cuff ditty or inspirational quote, I would conference-call my mate mid-blind panic attack to ask where the hell to click when it came to getting airborne. A quid pro quo Clarice situation.
I’d then run the gauntlet on skyscanner, a day’s worth of tension and broken dreams. At least I stacked my chips and went in. My brother and mother both still use a travel agent, a touch in 2024.
By the time one has spent an additional 300 quid paying for things like luggage and a seat and a list of accoutrements one would have thought might come with the price of the ticket in the first place, what then ensues is a week of high anxiety and the pressure that demands you turn up on the day in question. The last minute aspect also means paying far over the odds and sometimes crossing the same ocean twice. What takes a direct flight just under 13 hours has at times taken me two days.
The great thing about flying in first, my friend Cowper assures me, is the flight is literally like the first day of your holiday! The memory of 49 hours via Miami and the trauma that took a week out of my holiday and a year of snatched sleep flashes across my mind’s eye, I hold firm and think better of giving him more ammunition.
*
So there I was, having transferrred my non-transferrable ticket for the following week, another few hundred quid down some distant pan, approaching T5 with excitement and trepidation.
Nobody works in airports anymore.
People in Hi-Vis stand around facilitating procedures, while people in bad moods queue for self check-in shuffling along like cows in an abattoir. Interesting set-up, I mention to an upbeat Indian man working for Lufthansa. It’s actually quite fast if you know how to use it. I look at him blankly. No passenger in this terminal knows how to use it.
Across the ocean I fly.
Spend a dulcet three weeks in the pampa waiting for mealtimes. As usual the day of my departure creeps up, and the same chorus cascades from my father’s lips. You’re abandoning me. You come for two days and escape like always, doing what you please. It crosses my mind to delay, I channel my empire building DNA and succumb not to the manipulation of an irate Argentine, bid the family adios and hit up Ezeiza International Airport, the spring at the edges of the runway blooms.
Feeling smug about my word is bondness, I board, smiling warmly at the cabin crew.
I feel good. And with reason.
We all have a path, mine is clear.
This is no mere coincidence.
The number 33 is appearing everywhere, haunting me, coming to me in dreams. On LH0511 I’d paid 28 quid for Christ Consciousness, but walking down the aisle I see my destiny approach, 33H has a future emblazoned in the space between two armrests. Sitting there two away by the window, is a girl.
Things don’t start well.
33H backs onto a dividing barrier, and is just next to the loos. Both nice touches. But the wall behind me means the seat does not recline, even at all. This is not ideal. Sat bolt upright at 90 degrees I assess the situation.
The second thing that surprises me is a stewardess kindly offering me some ear plugs. I’ll be fine, I assure her, thanking her, once again warmly.
*
Everyone has an aeroplane style.
My mate Alfie watches fourteen films in a row. Stan springs for an earlydoors assessment of the snack trolley. My brother spent his youth sneaking into Club. In my adult years I’ve opted to opt out. I don’t eat, I watch nothing, I try simply to close my eyes and stubborn the experience out.
Imagine sitting in an armchair for 13 hours. It would be insane. Breathing in recirculated oxygen and the rancid waft of german coleslaw, a Lufthansa ‘classic’, a leg that keeps jerking you awake the moment you fall into slumber, and to plummet down the spirals of Dante’s inferno one begins.
So you like to raw dog, a mate said in passing the other day.
No shit. Low and behold, my aeroplane style now had a cool moniker. Raw-dogging involved no participation in the entertainment centre at all, no sleep, no water, and looking only intermittently at the travel centre for updates. I was born for this.
Six hours in I realise I am little over an hour and a half in.
I am defiant. No-one is raw dogging but me.
Things get worse.
It becomes apparent ‘the loos’ I am next to, are actually the main utility-station of the aeroplane, where they plate up and dispose of 520 meals. The nosiest part of the plane, a full 3 minute walk from the nearest loo, the reason I’d been offered earplugs. To make matters worse the girl next to me has not registered me.
33H is the right row, perhaps the wrong seat.
I spring for an odyssey to the loo.
A solitary used toothpick sits on the loo seat. A sign from Christ Consciousness, I wonder. The Lord moves in mysterious ways. I think it through. Following a twenty minute round trip, where I stumble over someone’s outstretched leg, I sit back down in time for the dimming of the cabin lights. The atmosphere is tight. The girl in 33J is out cold.
I resume the raw dogging.
Sleep takes me in its talons, kicking off an unfortunate chain of events. As consciousness drifts away, my dormant jerky leg takes on a new life, itself exacerbated by my chair not reclining, so I am jolted sharply awake continually, before I even realise I am falling asleep. This is painful and mainly confusing, continuing for an hour.
Admitting defeat, I take down 45 minutes of ET.
Nothing doing, I pace up and down the passage, tripping again over outstretched legs. A baby cries, a man lets rip. I hang out in the loo for ten minutes.
Fly in first mate, the holiday starts on the plane…
on the plane…
on the plane…
*
Eight hours later I am shaken awake by turbulence and the cranking up of the strip-lighting for a breakfast I want no part of, my chin covered in drool, my neck rusted over and fused to my left shoulder, the girl in 33J looking over at me like I am homeless.
35 minutes after that, we land in Frankfurt.
The entire cabin applauds, no doubt to mark the end of this unholy torment.
The connecting flight to Heathrow lasts an hour and feels like another thirteen.
*
A month or so later, flying back from Geneva after a bike trip and visiting a friend, I got to thinking.
What are we doing.
Why do we feel the need to fly all over the world, tracing plumes of jet engine across the skies, cross-hatching the heavens. For what. Yes it was lovely to go spend time with my old man, but those thirteen hours left a mark. I feel them still, a dull ache in my shoulder and neck. Maybe next time I’ll go overland, take my time, those who travel, a sage once said, change only their skies and not their minds.
Repetition is the death of magic.
Is anything exotic anymore, are we inured to it all. Rather than marvelling at the wonder of human engineering, hurtling through the sky just below the speed of sound, I’d reduced my user experience down to a seat not reclining, 45 minutes of ET, and a stray toothpick pointing to God.
In his book The Art Of Travel, de Botton concludes that all the travelling we need can be done from the confines of our bedroom, by dint of our imaginations. This need to see the world, this gluttony, our stash of air miles, did it only lead to the kind of nightmarish situation I suffered at the hands of Lufthansa LH0511, sat there, legs at ninety degrees to my back, staring at the glow of the flight path map, in 33H. It would have made more sense if my father hadn’t come from a country about as far across the globe as you can get.
And yet we fumble blindly on, shuffling bit by bit ever so uknowingly off our coil.
The sole cause of man’s unhappiness is that he doesn’t know how to stay quietly in his room.
Pascal
I mean do we have a choice.
I suppose there’s always Economy Plus.
