but it's my f$%ing armrest, guy

Being home is rather nice.

It smells a little less Kenya and a little more ‘shitters-I left-stewed fruit-in the fridge’.
It smells like home – and even though my windows have been shut and it smells somewhat stale in the old joint – frankly, it’s a whole lot better than that airport at 5:00am yesterday morning.

Home.

Where my vibrator and I can reignite our steamy relationship without wondering whether the hotel has cameras rigged in the room, built into the TV, facing my bed.

Don’t say that’s never happened. Because somewhere, on this kinky planet, heaving with human depravity and sexual animalism, there’s a hotel out there winding tape all over your naked backside. Of that I am almost certain.

I can watch the ever-eventful and retarding Reality Hell on E! and lie on my couch chavving it up in a pair of blue velour shorts.

That I have owned since 2005.

Home. Where I don’t have to fight for the armrest with some woman on the plane who insisted on powdering her nose every five seconds.

It was a passive aggressive fight; whereby I was determined to hunt down my territory – the armrest – through the weapon of elbow limb, and refuse to move.
Purely on matter of principle, while all the while staring out of the window like I hadn’t rooted it there on purpose.

She started it.

It’s economy class, where space per cubic centimetre is precious and half-existent. Not like up there in cushy class where Randall Abrahams was sitting with some curly haired agent. (What was he doing in Kenya? Starting a new Idols? Please say it isn’t so. Christ not another one. Please.)

Anyway, so this bitch is applying powder to her face, whilst studying the pores on her nose at the same time. Usually an activity of this trivial nature should take up relatively no room.

No, her arms are but butterflying all over my area. My area. Only obstructed by the buckle that is the seatbelt.

I’m about to start my drooling-on-inflatable-neck-cushion repertoire, while leaking great wodges of sound into my ears, and thinking of hot sex in Mexico, when I feel the formidable prick of my invisible personal bubble.

I frown downwards. Getting too assertive with immediate seatmates could mean another Lufthansagate.
And nobody wants one of those, even if there are no crowds of peeved flailing Germans in proximity.

So I wedge my elbow onto my armrest. See it’s mine, because she has another one on the other side which is perfectly usable.

I hate touching skin on skin with strangers. Who are obsessed with their nasal pores. And are not hot.

I almost caved.

But figured this bird needed to learn. Basic cattle etiquette – in Economy, cows shouldn’t graze on other cow’s seats. Oozing is an unfortunate product of the obese, and although immensely not cool to sit next to, they’re not overtly trying to get on your tits. They just to cool it on the 8 000 MacBurgers/month.

She starts to push at my elbow with her elbow ever slightly, so I just push harder.

We’re arm-wrestling for an armrest. Except using elbows. It’s up there with being headbutted by live game with a name.

Resting my elbow on my territory has never been so uncomfortable. She leans over to put her compact in her bag – a moment of weakness - and so I take the gap and rest the length of my arm on it, while smiling evilly.

Sneeze. Fuck, why? And now she’s back on.

This scenario went on for the duration of the four hour flight. I’m a determined bitch, and I should get Miles for this alone.

We never once looked at each other or pretended that her arm, jammed into my elbow bone, had any affect on me at all.

People have a lot to bitch about air travel. People who fart, the undeterminable space food, the legroom. But nobody talks about the Plane Politics.

planes

So I fly to Istanbul tomorrow night. Via London.
It’s going to one of those torturous journeys involving:

1) Sleep-induced spittle (Mine. I may not pooh, but I do drool when I sleep.)
2) Inflatable neck cushion
3) Cankles the size of the Ottomon Empire
4) 11 hours to London, stopover for 2 hours, and then another 4 hours to Istanbul

Rock and roll. I’m seriously going to be over reclining seats by the time I reach the airport smelling like a…plane person.

I’m cold. I’m grumpy. I shaved my legs for the first time in a month last night.

I’m also starting to get seriouuuuuusly excited. Hence the celebratory legshave.

The whole journey – and I feel like a Voortrekker – will be 17 hours. I’ve instructed my colleagues who arrive hours, days, weeks, before me, to have a cocktail on the ready at the rooftop pool terrace of our hotel.

Dad got me a bit scared last night.

He flies, loves it, and his vomit comet is only for those with balls of steel. But he’s been following Air France crash forums to the point where he knows every single detail of what might’ve gone wrong on that flight.
He said plane crashes happen usually as a result of at least two things going wrong.

Also because France sent troops to Afghanistan recently, one of the theories floating around is a terrorism attack. But surely that’s unlikely – terrorists wouldn’t be so quiet. When they do shit, they go big. They send a message loud and clear, publicity is their bag.

And let’s be honest, France would’ve surrendered by now.

He told me to ask the air hostess to tell the captain to fly around any thunderstorms, because now that planes are trying to cut costs, they fly through storms they would otherwise avoid if there wasn’t an economic crisis.

I know maybe only one plane seems to crash a year on average, say. But surely my personal probability rises if I were to say, take, 16 flights a year? (Which is what I did last year).

You also wonder, then, how many times you flown when you were close to crashing but you never realised it. Maybe only one thing went wrong, but how close were you to death? You get off, reckon it was a pretty turbulent flight, but it’s all good. When really, at some point, during the night, it maybe wasn’t?

I’m not a nervous flyer, that is until the plane suddenly lurches when being thrown around by desert thermals.
Then everyone's a nervous flyer, come on.

Take off, landing, is different: I grip the armrests, but more because I get the feeling pilots seem to enjoy double bouncing down a runway.

Also with regards to dodgy people on planes – touch wood the dodgiest situation I saw involved a cocaine smuggler being shunted off the plane from Buenos Aires by security cops in Cape Town.

He was sitting in front of me, charfing the air hostess in the obnoxious fashion that is both tiresome and pitiful, and next thing ‘Passport please’ and off he went, never to be seen again.

Will calm down by tomorrow.