Is it grim up north? It’s too expensive to go and find out

My flight to Italy a couple of weeks back was held on the runway for a while because of some altercation back at the departure gate. After a while the pilot appeared at the front of the cabin and, full of self-righteous anger, explained that ‘two Italians’ had been rude to the gate staff. He would not be allowing them onto ‘his’ plane, he said, and then began to lecture the rest of us as to how he wouldn’t tolerate any form of rudeness on any of ‘his’ flights, certainly not to ‘his’ staff, it was something up with which he most certainly would not put, he barked, puffed up to the size of a small planet. Just get behind the joystick, or whatever it is, and head for Naples, you pompous glorified bus-driver, I expect most of us were thinking; certainly this is what flashed through my mind. Along with: why are you lecturing us? We weren’t rude to those half-wits. I had planned to be rude, as it happens, because I was still smarting from the usual rip-off over a normal-sized suitcase filled with normal stuff but which had been deemed too heavy, and I’d have to pay another forty quid. But as I came up to the desk the notion somehow deserted me and I just trudged through obediently, head down, minding my p’s and q’s, strapping myself into a seat seemingly designed for Karen Carpenter in her last weeks, and preparing for the usual barrage of instructions about what I could and couldn’t do.

I made a promise to myself last year that I would travel by plane much less frequently henceforth, so unpleasant has the experience become these days. It is encapsulated in that pilot’s tirade: MY flight, and you bastards always try to spoil it.