I’m officially on the countdown to an exciting and much-anticipated OS trip with my mama. I can’t wait for our two week visit to London and Paris, spending my days eating scones and drinking champagne. A bit concerned that all the activities I’ve thought of doing seems to involve food or drink, but that’s what holidays are for, right? Come on! I need to feel ok about coming back looking like fatty boom batty.
I am not looking forward to the hideous 300 hours flight there and back… it almost puts me off going, to be honest. I’m a terrible traveller and I’m quite worried my mother might disown me by the time we land at Heathrow. That is if I haven’t drowned myself by trying to flush myself down the blue-tinged aeroplane toilet. I’m not scared of flying, but having to spend more than four hours in a plane makes sticking a hot fork in my eye and listening to Taylor Swift try to rap on ‘Shake it off’ on repeat seem like preferable activities.
It’s not just being cooped up in the cramped confines of a metal cylinder, hurtling through sub-space, with little understanding of how it stays in the air for many hours at a time. It’s not just the swollen ankles and the food Lean Cuisine rejected. It’s the flipping other passengers!
Flying is uncomfortable, it’s boring… I get it, but it’s no excuse for behaving like a total wang.
There is an Instagram account called @passengershaming that is exposing the atrocious behaviour of beings that should be considered humans, but I’ve seen gorillas act better than some of these people. Poo flinging aside.
I wish there were more of this on planes… that’s what I call ‘in-flight entertainment’. I’ve actually been on a plane with Courtney Love, but she wasn’t this fun.
There’s the usual chair tilting issues, the rude passenger who thinks it’s ok to treat a hostie like their personal butler (hey, we all want a packet of peanuts, dude. Wait your turn!), the screaming babies, the absolutely abhorrent state the bathrooms are left in, but so many instances recorded on @passengershaming seem to involve people’s feet. Yes, their feet.
Look, I’m all for getting as comfy as possible, but this is a plane, not your bedroom, so let’s make a pact and a rule that EVERYONE must follow on planes: all items considered underclothing (bras, boxers, knickers, long johns, bloomers, girdles, socks, what have you) must stay on at all times!! If I see someone taking off a sock on a flight, I may shove that cheese encrusted item in their ear and use it as a flossing device, because that piece of cotton/poly blend fabric is the only thing that is trapping the stench of feet that have trodden kilometres of airport terminal and that’s probably in the milder cases.
Maybe I’m a little touchy after a flight home from Japan a few years back. Look the trip was ok, but not the best. My poor Nanna passed away back home; I managed to somehow dislocate my shoulder on the flight over trying to take off my jumper (this was before I even got on a pair of skis, which was the point of the holiday); I got to experience the delights of the Japanese hospital system (oh my God, Medicare I LOVE YOU) to try and figure out if it was in fact a shoulder dislocation and not a pneuomthorax, which included a very sweet Japanese nurse miming ‘take off your bra’ so she could attach some EKG leads to my ample (only by Eastern standards) Western bosom. This would have been easier if the male translator was allowed in, thank God he wasn’t, but fat lot of good you were, mate.
Stop the madness!
Anyway. Rant over. My apologies. Yes, there were some obstacles, but we made it to the end of the trip and the flight home. Settled into our seats, comforted by the fact that another flight to Sydney for a fundraising conference offering up questionable ethical practices and a funeral were awaiting me on my return, the gent across the aisle proceeded to remove his socks for what was probably the first time in numerous weeks. I’m sorry, I thought this was a flight to Cairns, not a freaking stilton cheese sampling. The air in a plane is stuffy enough, let alone adding the stench of what I imagine the nappies of 100 babies’ with intestinal woes would smell like. My husband and I thought we might actually faint – we do not know how the man sitting next to him did not die from noxious gas exposure. I was half expecting to see cartoon plumes rise from his feet. It was the olfactory equivalent of an internal ultrasound – highly uncomfortable, seemingly unending and potentially vomit inducing.
So for God’s sake, next time you’re on a flight take that Valium and red wine, shut the hell up and put your flipping feet away.
It's Claire as mud 
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