I’m listening to one of our best friends, Sarah Turner, talking to me on my headphones about floating in a giant rainbow bubble in some amazing tranquil garden that I’ve wandered into. Sarah is one of several of our friends who is a professional hypnotherapist and I tend to rotate between MP3 recordings made by our different hypno-buddies depending what level of stress I am feeling. I find takeoff and turbulence the two hardest things about flying. This is when I *need* to be told I am floating in a rainbow and not careering along a runway in a hulking metal cage filled with extremely explosive jet fuel, hoping for the best to ascend into the sky.
Takeoff always feels so implausible. Like you are running down a road on an elephant and expecting it to suddenly launch itself into the air and stay there. Just a regular elephant and not Dumbo. Every tiny bump on the runway makes me feel like the plane is about to be knocked off its trajectory and career sideways into a stack of parked planes or a nearby fuel tanker. The roaring of the engines makes me feel something somewhere is about to burst…even if it’s just the vein in my left temple.
I studied Physics up to A-level and yet despite looking at all the formulae and diagrams of how planes fly it still seems like black magic to me. Small wonder I switched from A level Physics to Art halfway through the course.
I try to remember the school book illustrations of plane wings surrounded by meaningful arrows denoting air rushing at the wing causing some sort of upwards lift nonsense but ultimately it’s all bollocks and everyone knows it doesn’t make any sense. We all can agree now, if you’ve read any of my previous travel blogs, that the ONLY thing keeping THIS plane in the air is me concentrating on clenching my anal sphincter really really tightly the entire thirteen hour journey. If I relax my bum for even one moment, allowing my laser sharp focus to lapse, then we’ll fall from the air like a coconut from a tree, and everyone will die, horribly horribly, and it will all be my fault.
Somehow our hulking metal elephant launches into the sky against all laws of logic and gravity and we’re up, clawing our way through the clouds as if each one were a grapple hook that we have to grab and push ourselves off from to get to the blue sky above us. The overhead lockers above our heads rattle and the wings shudder with the effort of not exploding into the lego bricks that this plane is clearly made from.
I practice my deep slow breathing as Sarah’s gentle voice tries to soothe me and remind me that everything is beautiful, wonderful and peaceful.
And suddenly… it is! We are above the clouds, the golden sun streaking through the cabin and making us all blink like newborn babies just popped out of the womb, the plane stops wheezing and shuddering like an old man’s orgasm and levels out to a smooth cruise over the clouds below us – a snowscape of whipped mashed potato that we now float over like utter miraculous magic. I can allow my bumhole to relax two notches on the sphincter scale without invoking gravity and causing a disaster.
One of the scary-beautiful air hostesses appears and starts handing out hot moist flannels in little packets with some tiny tongs so as not to scald her perfectly manicured delicate lady hands. We accept this offering gladly, without having the slightest clue what it is for. But like staying in an expensive hotel you take ALL THE FREE THINGS because ultimately you have already paid heavily for them. I unfold my hot damp flannel and wonder at its intended purpose. Is it because we are in economy class and she thinks we haven’t had a wash yet today? Is it because the stress of takeoff has made us all produce copious amounts of sweat she feels we need to deal with? Is she putting us to work cleaning our own drop down food trays before we eat? I literally have no idea as the only other time I have been handed a hot damp towel is at the end of a very dodgy madras in an East London curry house which was probably to clean the turmeric stains off my face.
I hazard a guess that the hot damp towel is to somehow make us feel pampered without actually supplying us with snacks and drinks, which is what we really want. Like a mini spa treatment for the cattle class passengers whilst the business class lot get a free bag of Aveda moisturising products and a personal calf massage from a tiny masseuse that pops out of a compartment in the footwell of their fancy booths when they press a little button on their console. I’ll admit, I’m easily pacified by the little hot flannel, even if it remains a bit of a mystery.
Sarah’s voice soothes me a little more. I concentrate harder on slow, deep breaths with long pauses in between. I try to relax my face, my neck, my ears (does she actually ask me to relax my ears or did I imagine that?). The captain interrupts Sarah’s poetic purrs on the intercom and introduces himself. For some reason I always like this bit. It’s somehow reassuring that your flight captain has time to have a little chat in a nice calm, upbeat voice and isn’t just hiding in his cockpit screaming and pressing random buttons as I imagine him to be most of the time…at least I would be if I were in charge of this plane.
Captain Reassuring then fucks up royally by mentioning that there are ‘three hours of heavy turbulence expected over the Bay of Bengal.’ He thinks he’s being helpful by forewarning us, but the Bay of Sodding Bengal isn’t for about another 10 hours into this flight and all he has done is given me something to worry about for the next 10 hours when I was planning on enjoying some guilt-free tv time, having a nice nap and possibly even getting slightly drunk on the free drinks.
(That makes me sound more party animal than I am. André can testify it takes me precisely three quarters of a glass of Pinot Noir to get tiddly and a glass and a half to get completely rat-arsed. I am, as it’s known in the trade…a very cheap date).
I am trying to use the console thingy’s map thingy to see if I can find out exactly where the Bay of Bengal is, and whether it looks like the sort of place that, if we crash landed in the sea, would be full of sharks or not. I eventually find it on the globe map and decide there would definitely be sharks, possibly pirates, and almost definitely no decent wifi connection, should the terrible turbulence down the plane.
As there is absolutely nothing I can do about my eventual death, even though Captain Fantastic thought he’d let me ruminate on it for half a day, I decide to continue with my previous plan to make the most of the luxurious opportunity I have to sit on my arse and do bugger all. Disappointingly, the seats are not as comfortable as I expected for the price of the ticket. They are leathery but the padding is a bit lacklustre for a long haul flight. I do have reasonable leg room I guess, but to stretch out my legs fully I still need to do a sort of sideways hip twist in one direction or another. Whichever way I sleep, one of my bum cheeks is going to pay the price.
Beautiful Singapore Airlines air hostess number one appears gracefully from behind a little curtain with a drinks trolley. I’m going to call her Kimberley, even though she is Asian, because she might well be a Kimberley and you’d be a bit racist to think she couldn’t be. Kimberley gestures to a little card in my seat pocket with a huge list of the free drinks and snacks on offer during this flight. She then makes it abundantly clear that the only ones she can be bothered to get us are the ones already on the trolley, which are white wine, red wine or a Singapore Sling cocktail and the only available snack being a strange little packet of dried peas and rice crackers.
‘When in Rome’, I say to André (in my head, as this would obviously be a 
completely naff thing to say out loud when on the way to Singapore), and we order two Singapore Slings just so we can say we had one. Neither of us knows what’s in one. We are already being that special kind of daring that people save for when they go on holiday. I decide to also ask for an orange juice now, because I do not trust Kimberley with the drinks any more than I did with the snacks.
Kimberley pours out two unnaturally bright orangey-red drinks and hands them to us with a smile that simultaneously says ‘Enjoy your beverage!’ and ‘I hope you like E numbers, suckers!’
We drink up. It’s rather sweet, with a bit of a kick, and then sour at the same time but not terrible. One is certainly enough. Having had a drink, fifteen minutes later my travel bladder kicks into action and I have to use the loo. Thankfully there is no one in the 3rd seat on our little row, so I only have to get André up to let me out.
I feel a bit nervous out of my seat on any aircraft but I know it is important to stretch your legs regularly on long haul flights. The gangways are full of older passengers doing knee bends and lunges in an effort to avoid our ageing knees and hips seizing up whereas the younger passengers flop about their seats like unfurled cats, displaying their supple, pliable joints as if they were nothing…in the way such things are nothing to the young. Bastards.
I wait for my turn by the loos, joining in the geriatric ballet to pass the time and keep the blood in my legs moving. An exhausted young man in a nearby seat is failing to amuse his bored and overly tired toddler, who is on the verge of erupting into tears. I pull faces and clown around for the small child, whose face lights up at the attention. The father looks grateful and relieved for a tiny respite. I pull more faces and play peekaboo from behind my hand. The young child giggles and squeaks. But then it is my turn for the loo, and I wave bye bye to the toddler who immediately punches his dad in the head and screams.
I’m not going to talk in detail about my weeing, because I promised I would try not to this holiday, but I do just want to say this. Why does ANYONE want a full length mirror right opposite a toilet in a room so small that you have nothing else to look at besides yourself with your pants round your ankles and your belly fat sat in little compressed Michelin tyres upon your lap while you do your business? I don’t want to know what face I pull on the loo. And I don’t want to see what I look like when I wipe my lady lettuce with toilet paper. Whoever designed these toilets was an utter weirdo.
Back in my seat, I choose the new ‘Mary Poppins Returns’ film from the console. At home I had refused to pay to see this at the cinema as it seemed like being unfaithful to Julie Andrews who I adore. But here it is free and it might just soothe me down a level or two on the sphincter scale and allow me to sleep for a bit. Julie would understand. Julie would forgive me. Or at worse give me a raised eyebrow and a hard stare.
Mary Poppins Returns turns out to be reassuringly charming, much like the original. It’s set in the 1940s and everyone is smartly dressed, including the children. Everyone has lovely manners…even the leeries (gas lamp lighters who by all intents and purposes should have shitty Dick Van Dyke mockney accents). It’s all very lovely and everyone is morally decent (except the baddies, of course), and I wonder if this is what my parents’ generation imagined life would go back to if they voted for Brexit.
I look down at my own travel attire and sigh at my comparative shabbiness and lack of chic tailoring. The last time I flew in harem pants I felt like one of the cool people. They look distinctly less cool this time, combined with my knee-length compression flight socks and comfy trainers. André must either love me very much not to mention how odd I look, or he’s so past caring he doesn’t notice any more.
A line in the film catches my breath away:-
‘Today or never, that’s my motto!’
And I find myself welling up with tears out of nowhere. I’m crying for two reasons. A realisation that I am in fact seizing the day, grabbing life by the testicles and flying to the other side of the planet in the spirit of adventure and it makes me feel emotional because I am not usually the brave and adventuring sort. And then I am crying because of Tony.
Tony was in my sister’s class in infant school and junior school. His younger brother Pete was in my class, and the two families grew up in the same village, knew all the same people, attended the same school discos, birthday parties, school sports days, camping trips, etc. After middle school we all lost touch for a bit and then found each other years later, first on Friends Reunited and then on Facebook.
I hadn’t really *known* Tony as a child, other than he was part of my sister’s crowd and we all shared memories, shared the same spaces – the same winter snowball fights on the school field, the autumn conker challenges, the summer grass wars after the school field got mowed – but we shared a certain amount of history that bonded us a little and it was enough of a connection to build on in adult life when I got to know Tony a little better. What I knew of him was this…if ever I tried to do something good, something nice, like raise some money for charity or that time I organised a collection for a memorial bench for our lovely old 4th form teacher Mr Rabjohn…Tony was always the first to support my efforts. He was incredibly generous and kind and yet utterly humble with it – never requiring praise or public acknowledgment for his many kindnesses. Just a good, kind man. ‘Sound as a pound.’ My sister always said.
Tony worked in security at the Marina Sands Bay Hotel, the most iconic building in all of Singapore, that looks like a three legged ‘Pi’ symbol with a swimming pool on the roof overlooking the most fabulous 360 degree views of the city. Being the keen swimmer I am, when I saw a photo of that hotel I set my heart on visiting that rooftop pool. If not to swim then just to look.
The last time Tony had visited me, a few months ago, he said ‘I know a guy who could get you in there,’ and winked at me with a cheeky smile. When we booked our tickets to Australia, we decided to go via Singapore so we could go visit Tony and he had promised to collect us from the airport and help us make the most of our stopover day, driving us all around the sights, taking us to all the best places to eat, to get instagrammable photos, and to get in free to the rooftop pool garden of the Marina Bay Hotel. How could we resist?
There is something so adorably comforting when flying so far away from home in a strange strange land to meet up with an old familiar friend and have them help you cut through the nonsense of being a clueless tourist – showing you all the sorts of sights and treasures that only a local would know, and the shortcuts to get there and the best ways of saving money in the process. It was going to be awesome.
Except..yesterday, Tony died.
It wasn’t a massive shock. We knew he was dying, he had pancreatic cancer and he’d been dying for a long time actually. No, strike that. He’d been LIVING not dying. Living every single day he could with the best possible attitude.
Tony had defied the odds from the moment he was diagnosed. He outlived even the most generous predictions of his possible survival time. He responded very well to some of his treatments, and even with those that didn’t work out he kept battling, kept smiling. Every time I saw him on Facebook he was flying off somewhere fancy – golfing in America, visiting family in the UK, grinning at us out of happy picture after happy picture – so many friends, so much laughter. He smiled so much and survived his diagnosis for so long I actually thought there could be a miracle and he was going to beat what I knew to be an unbeatable cancer. I wanted to believe in that miracle as much as the kids on the screen wanted to believe in Mary Poppins.
A few weeks back, I’d been trying to raise some money to help a client of mine pay for some very special memorial plaster casts. A lovely young mum had lost her child to cot death at just a few months old, and she’d desperately wanted something to remember him by, to be able to connect with the child so cruelly taken from her too soon. Tony had never met this lady, but he sent over the remaining balance for the money she needed to find to pay for her casts. That was the kind of person he was. No thanks required. Just a kind kind thing from a kind kind man.
When she found out, the mother said it gave her hope for the world, knowing there was such kindness even from complete strangers. And that she would pass on that kindness one day when she was in a position to. And in that way her son’s death would not be in vain because he would leave a legacy of kindness that might ripple out into the world.
And this is what Tony left too. His last words to me, written just a few days before his death from his hospital bed were a bit garbled and I guessed the medication he was on was making it hard for him to type. He was still trying to help get me organised for this trip, even while he lay dying in bed. Still helping. Still making every single day count. And I think that’s why that Mary Poppins quote tipped me over the edge because it reminded me that life really is for the seizing and making the most of the way Tony did. Opportunities are there for grabbing and fears are there to be overcome. And if you can do all that whilst spreading a bit of joy like Tony, then all the better.
My emotions are suddenly jarred back into the moment by Kimberley thrusting her trolley in our direction as she orders us to put our seat backs up into the upright position as our meal is about to be served.
I have been cunning. I learned many years ago that on flights, awkward people get served first. So if you have a special dietary requirement then the stewardesses will seek you out before they do their general trolley dash to make sure the awkward bastards are sorted out. On this note, I have pre-ordered Asian vegetarian meals for myself and lacto-ovo vegetarian meals for André. The idea being that having two slightly different meals, if one of has something we don’t like, we could swap.
I recognise that my choice of Asian vegetarian is a risk with my sensitive stomach and only limited shared toilet facilities. Since detoxing a few years ago, I have been fairly sensitive to onions and garlic and highly sensitive to cauliflower and chilli…all likely ingredients in my Asian veggie dinner. But I look over at Andre’s more regular veggie meal and it looks like school dinners from the 1970s and realise I’ve won out with my mushroom noodles with tofu. As predicted, we get served our meal a good 30 minutes before anyone else around us. Smug face. Less smug-inducing news is that because we are on a ‘special diet’ we are not allowed the ice cream that other passengers are currently being gifted by Kimberley and her friends in the cabin crew. I think I actually saw a tear form in André’s eye when they told him this.
What is even less satisfying is the fact that although *we* have to have our seats in upright position while we eat, the people in front of us still have theirs in recline position because they are not yet eating. This means my tv screen console thingy is now about four inches from my nose. This wouldn’t be such a problem if I didn’t have the kind of deteriorating eyesight where I have to hold everything at arms length to see it/read it/identify it even with my glasses on. Watching Mary Poppins this closely is like drinking neat orange squash with my brain. It is too intense and I can’t cope. I’m turning off the telly for a bit and trying not to drop noodles down my top.
Peering down I wonder how I can possibly have already gained SO much visible weight when I’ve only had a few travel snacks and some noodles thus far? How many calories are in a Singapore Sling and why the hell do I look so goddamn puffy?
After dinner (or is it breakfast? I’ve already lost track of our time zone and lost a few hours half watching films and half eating snacks), André and I try to get comfy for a much needed nap. But no matter how hard I try, I cannot get comfortable. André and I are both utterly convinced the other has more leg room. I have the window seat which does indeed give me more space to the side of me, but I can’t lean into that space because there are gaps between the seats and the wall and if I lean into it my travel pillow falls down the gap!
I’m shuffling from bum cheek to bum cheek trying my hardest to find some position that doesn’t hurt some part of me but it’s impossible. Eventually I pile up my travel pillow, André’s travel pillow, the supplied mini pillows they left on our seats, and both blankets, and make a little neck nest for us to share in the middle of our two seats. André naps on and off and I lay there, still uncomfortable with my eyes shut, just stroking his arm and trying to relax.
I have been stroking his arm in this position for 20 minutes feeling a little unloved that he hasn’t either taken my hand in his or caressed me back when I realise I have in fact been stroking the velveteen cover of the travel pillow, not André, which explains why his skin felt so soft and fuzzy and why he never reciprocated the affection. But despite this waste of energy, I have to move NOW before my butt goes completely numb. This wakes André up as I dislodge the comfort pile between us. If I just had ONE more pillow I could probably have enough to fashion a decent amount of padding next to the window and lean the other way.
Then I saw it…in front of me and to the right, a lady is asleep, and her pillow has slid backwards through the gap between her seat and the window. She’s asleep. She doesn’t need it. She wouldn’t notice. Would she?
I know I am a bad person and Julie Andrews would definitely judge me, but I am SO tired, and I need to sleep so badly that all my morals depart me. I STEAL the pillow from the sleeping lady in the seat in front of me. Do I feel guilty? No. I feel only delight at my success. I now have three Singapore Airlines pillows (because I have stolen André’s one as well), two travel pillows, two blankets and my sweater cardigan which I wrap around everything to make one MASSIVE travel pillow to fill the gap between me and the window. I’m just shifting from my dead buttock onto the living one and literally braying with the relief of being able to stretch my aching tired bones in different directions when the captain flashes on the FASTEN YOUR SEATBELT sign.
‘Ladies and gentlemen, please fasten your seatbelts as we will be entering that area of expected turbulence over the Bay of Bengal that I mentioned earlier.’
I cannot sleep. People around me are snoring but I cannot. I have my headphones in and am being told I am floating in a rainbow or a fucking cloud or something but I am NOT relaxed and I am NOT comfortable and I am tired and I am grumpy and no amount of pillows, stolen or otherwise can make it better.
André is not asleep either. He says the vegetarian meal gave him wind. ‘If planes could be powered by farts…’ he tells me, ‘I’d have flown the plane all the way here myself so far.’
We have run out of snacks. Kimberley has been hiding behind her little curtain at the end of the aisle for the last 3 hours. Since the Singapore Sling and orange juice an hour into the flight, she hasn’t been back to offer us any more drinks. I can feel my eyeballs drying up into husks.
There is a little call button above my head which theoretically I KNOW I can press to ask her to come and bring me stuff, but my social anxiety with air hostesses proves just too much and I remain parched and uncomfortable for the rest of the flight resenting her for my own inability to be assertive about what I need.
The turbulence isn’t as bad as predicted. I drift off to sleep at last. And then suddenly BAM! We have landed in Singapore!!
I get a message from my mobile phone company to tell me I will be charged four hundred pounds, my first born grandchild and my left kidney for making or receiving calls, texts or using data in this country. The Captain tells us it is 32 degrees outside and thanks us for flying Singapore Airlines. Kimberly also thanks us. I strongly suspect she has been hiding up the back drinking the remains of the Singapore Sling cocktail mix the last four hours but I can’t prove a thing. We gather our things and leave..managing not to make eye contact with the lady from the seat directly in front of me who is rubbing her neck while frowning. And off the plane we go…grateful for the safety of land, regretting our fashion choices in this sudden humid heat and stepping out onto an entirely new continent.
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