Flight of Angst

That bloody woman!!!

We have just got back after flying home from Crete, following a cruise on the Ocean Village 2. That had to be one of the worst ever nightmare flights I've ever had. Nothing wrong with the plane - which was not the one shown by the way, that's the one we went on and was a quite ordinary 757. No, the plane coming back was a quite exciting 767 with 8 seats to a row. We were in seats D and E so I thought we had window seats and was quite relieved when we found we were sitting in the middle, as someone had been violently sick all over the seatbelt in the window seat... And it wasn't the handling of the plane by the crew. They were so confident of their own abilities they had mounted video cameras on the bottom of the fuselage and we were treated to live coverage of both take-off and landing. Just think how that would have enhanced the Hudson River landing...!

No it was the bloody woman in the seat next to me. Not Fran who was the model of best-behaved sitter-in-the-next-seat. The bloody woman on the other side. For a start she was so large she took up all her own seat and a third of mine and a third of the one on her other side also. Though that was occupied by a relative of hers and he was probably well aware what would happen to the space allocated to him by the airline and had accordingly starved himself to the point of extinction, so he was pencil thin and able to take this invasion of his space with a carefree laugh. I'm not pencil thin. I do try my best and I've come back with my belt a notch tighter than when I went (bloody hurts...) but I wasn't, don't, and hopefully never will, overflow my seat like some giant amoeba, flowing over people left and right.

Our dinner, when it came in one of those particularly attractive plastic kidney dishes that airlines use, was chicken and mashed potato with peas and (yuck!) green beans and the whole was then "messed" with by having a painfully thin (even worse than Miss Gargantuan of 2009's travelling companion) sauce, which looked like old washing up suds with a hint of tomato and which, had they provided a menu, I am sure would have been announced as a jus which is a modern euphemism for "sorry we didn't have as many gravy granules as we thought we had..."

Anyway, whilst in ordinary circumstances I might have enjoyed the chicken and mash, they were on the left of the kidney shaped dish and therefore out of reach because my left arm was forced across my chest by the elbow, arm, and right bingo wing of my nemesis in the next seat. This led to me having to put up with peas and (yuck!) green beans until Fran reached over to help me lift up the woman's arm so I could turn my dish round the other way, giving me access to the bits I actually liked. Although by then they had bits of fluff from her cardigan sleeve encrusted over them like a sprinkling of hundreds and thousands on an ice cream.

And then to add insult to injury, she poured a can of Britvic orange juice into a glass and immediately knocked it over into my lap... I looked helplessly down at the folded out tray covered in an assortment of dinner, afters in a separate box, corrugated cardboard mat and assorted plastic cutlery and realised that, as the orange juice started to soak through my trousers and underwear:

1. there is a considerable amount of orange juice in one of those little cartons and


2. there was no way I could get to my soaked leg and naughty bits to mop up the citrus flood that was now pointing out that, not only was it liquid and flowing, but it was also cold!

"Oh, did that go on you?" she asked in a concerned voice. I was meanwhile trying to pile my dinner and all the other stuff onto Fran's tray so I could mop myself up, but there wasn't a lot of chance.

"Yes...!" I said, giving her a long meaningful stare that she didn't know the meaning of. This perhaps because she never even saw it - she was too busy loudly telling her companion on the other side and the rest of the plane "Ooh, I've just spilt my orange juice all over this gentleman..." And then as the coup de grace; "...and I was just looking forward to it too..."

So I spent the rest of the journey with sticky loins... I did think of going to the toilet but by the time I'd got my tray raised there was not much left in the way of actual liquid (as opposed to obvious damp patch) which would have made the journey to and from the toilet a vignette of widening eyes and whispers behind hands. "It's orange juice!" I could have cried, but inviting people to sniff to verify could have been misconstrued and so I sat there, dignified but somewhat icky, whilst the bloody woman got out a puzzle book and dug her elbow under my armpit with each stroke of the pen on the word-search...

I'm home now. Showered... I need a holiday...

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