The price of nothing!

I wish I loved the Human Race;

I wish I loved its silly face;

I wish I liked the way it walks;

I wish I liked the way it talks;

And when I’m introduced to one,

I wish I thought "What Jolly Fun!"

Sir Walter Raleigh

No, not that Sir Walter, the more modern one.

These immortal lines suggested themselves to me as I found my self intimately cheek by jowl with my fellow humans on a plane from Gran Canaria to Bristol this morning; very early this morning; very, very early this morning.

By their shufflings in their seats may ye know them! When you fly with Thomson you begin to appreciate the inches difference in seat separation in planes. Thomson seems to think that most of their passengers are emaciated dwarfs. I can now, from painful physical experience tell that benighted organization that this is simply not the case.

If you are six foot or over then travelling by charter airline is little short of the United Nations’ definition of torture.

For people of height, the airlines rely on the hardy nature of the patella to make travel possible. Every shudder of the aircraft is transmitted through the back of the seat in front via the knee; this, in itself is uncomfortable – if the seat in front is occupied then the pain level begins to rise.

In a modern, cost conscious aeroplane people are squeezed together in a way that makes the normal sardine tin look like club class fish packing. This unnatural proximity of flesh with hard plastic demands a certain restraint on the part of the sitter towards his kneemate.

Some people seem to think that they exist in an exclusive comfort zone on a plane, independent of other people’s sufferings. They develop a particularly unthinking form of Saint Vitas’ dance where their selfish writhings are translated into levels of physical discomfort not usually found outside the wearing of cheap sandals (ah the voice of experience!) for the poor sufferers behind them.

A few of the truly godless utilize the Armageddon button on their seats and activate the recline mode. Here the ‘normal’ pain of abrasive knocks is augmented by the crushing force of a backwardly mobile seat.

The two women in front of me for the trip to Gran Canaria (May they rot in the most hideous pit of hell!) seemed to take a ghoulish delight is seeing how deeply they could bruise my lower extremities, positively bouncing their leprous bodies against the back of their pestilential seats. The only form of defence is attack and this can only take the form of smashing the top of the seat in front back to an upward position (very difficult to accomplish without making it look like an open declaration of war) to using the knees to stop further incursions into your space (very difficult to accomplish without making the knee cap look like a rickets riddled wreck.)

The only solution is consideration, and, believe you me, that adjective was not one which sprang to mind when surveying the passengers of the flight that I was on. The behaviour of a group of repulsive females will have to wait for a later blog when I have recovered my self sufficiency and irony!

So, the delayed flight was a nightmare with no possibility of even a light snooze with the jitterbugging cretin in front of me. The horror reached its apogee with the announcement from the captain as we were reaching Bristol that there was a possibility that poor visibility would necessitate our landing in Cardiff. The irony of that, with our car in the Silver Car Park in Bristol, is too poignant to go into!

Luckily a safe Bristol landing and an uneventful (if tiring) drive to Cardiff; unpacking, washing started, a quick bath and bed for a few hours, soon made life worth living again. You’ll notice that I have not made any snide remarks about the twenty three degree difference in temperature between Gran Canaria and Bristol.

Some things are beyond irony!