Trapped in the middle seat next to a Dublin businessman in the window seat, I was subjected to a monologue on the ‘far right’.
‘It’s not Islamic extremism we need to be worried about,’ he said. I wanted very badly to say it absolutely is Islamic extremism we need to be worried about, but I kept my mouth shut. If it had kicked off between us, the pilot might have decided to turn around and do an emergency landing.
Snakes on a Plane was a silly movie, completely unrealistic. I have an idea for a much more convincing sequel about being trapped on an aircraft with a terrifying menace, and it’s called Lefties on a Plane. This has happened to me twice, both times on budget airlines where the narrowness of the seat made it all the more horrifying.
The Dublin businessman was a know-it-all who wanted to showcase his political knowledge. He leaned in and told me conspiratorially that the reason he knew so much was that he worked for the government. His firm did secret contracts to do with intelligence and security, he claimed. He ordered a drink and glugged it down. I let him blurt out everything he wanted to blurt, in case he turned out to be someone important, which I’m pretty sure he wasn’t.
I was so offended by what he was saying about ordinary working-class people that I wanted to ask the stewardess to change my seat, but the plane was packed. There was no threat from al Qaeda or Isis, he said. The threat was all from the far right, by which sweeping definition it turned out he simply meant people who were poor and ignored.
‘We’ve had our eye on this for a long time. We saw it coming. After Brexit it all took off…’ Here we go, I thought. It was a struggle for the next hour not to spark an incident and force the plane into an emergency landing.
Ever since being trapped next to him, I’ve paid extra to book the window seat on Ryanair on the basis that I can slump against the window and pretend to go to sleep. The other day, flying from Gatwick to Cork, I was in this window seat when an Irish lady took the middle seat and began to read her book, indicating she would be no trouble. But then an English lady arrived in a flutter of fuss to take the aisle seat.
She was puzzled about everything, I decided, because no conspiracy theory was getting through to her
She got settled in the way an upper-middle-class English person does on Ryanair, by making derisory comments about the unspeediness of the boarding and the lack of leg room, as though she had paid £500 for the ticket, not £50.
The plane had not even begun taxiing when she started. She introduced herself to the Irish lady, the Irish lady politely asked if she was going on holiday, clutching the open book she was hoping to read, and the English lady said she had a second home in Ireland. Oh, this will be good, I thought.
The Irish lady said that was nice, whereupon the English lady decided to talk at the poor Irish woman all the way to Cork. Donald Trump was awful, very volatile, always changing his mind. Who can the Democrats get in? The governor of Philadelphia, perhaps. People were destitute, living in tented communities. (Whether she meant in LA or Worthing was hard to tell.) She was appalled by the lack of action on debt and spending. Also, why didn’t the M25 work? I heard myself muttering: ‘Oh for goodness sake.’ I’d have taken a python making its way down the aisle any day over this.
As the trolley approached, I tried to order a drink by offering the refreshment credit I had been sent on my Ryanair app as we had been delayed. The stewardess apologised and said she didn’t know how to do that and I said fine, don’t worry. The stewardess went to move off, but the lady intervened. Speaking very loudly and slowly at me, she said: ‘You need to present that to a shop or restaurant in the terminal!’
Then she sat back and recommenced her monologue. ‘I do a lot of birding,’ she said. Please, I thought, can someone tell me what is wrong with the phrase ‘bird-watching’? Did I miss that memo? Is ‘watching’ too invasive an upset of a word to the dignity of the bird? Does it impinge on the tweetie’s civil rights? Birding. Oh please. If ever a word was invented by lefties in denial about reality, it’s birding.
She had plans all the way to Christmas and beyond. By the time she was detailing her social schedule for January I wanted to wrestle the emergency door off and jump out. I watched the Isle of Wight go past beneath me as she listed her opinions about every news item that day. Everything in the world was puzzling her. ‘What I don’t understand,’ she said, ‘is why does Trump look so good?’ The Irish woman could not enlighten her. So she moved on. ‘What I don’t understand is, don’t all these royals with cancer have the best private healthcare screening?’
She was puzzled about everything, I decided, because no conspiracy theory was getting through to her. She was so far from having a risqué Google of a wacky blog that she had no ideas, not even wacky ones, to explain all the crazy stuff that’s been happening. Once the obvious had been eliminated, she was stumped. The plane was wobbling down to land, but she didn’t draw breath as it thumped on to the tarmac. As passengers filled the aisles to get off, she harrumphed: ‘Nothing very speedy about this is there?’
No, there’s not meant to be. Speedy disembarkation isn’t a thing, not unless you count being told to climb out on to the wing in an emergency which, on Ryanair, can be arranged, but that was the sort of recent news story that would have left her confused. ‘What I don’t understand,’ she would have said, ‘is why Ryanair is allowed to evacuate planes like that…’
‘Well, we’ve sorted out the world,’ she said, as she took up her bag and bid her new friend farewell. ‘We could run things better than them. They should be asking us!’
It could have been worse, I decided. It could have been me in the middle seat.
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