Air travel sometimes is the pits
I’M tapping this week’s gadgie report whilst strapped into the seat of a Corfu-bound airliner and it’s inspired a real radge and a half!
Incidentally, if I just crane my neck to see past the geezer who is so fat hwes almost documentary material, I can just about catch the breathtaking view of the Alps sliding past under our port wing.
The word breathtaking is particularly apt considering the bloke in the next seat is giving off an armpit ming that would knock a buzzard off sewage cart.
To be fair, I’m not exactly smelling like the Yves Saint Laurent counter at Fenwick’s myself – my pound shop deodorant is the latest casualty in the war on terror, snatched away because it was 125ml instead of a 100.
Now I’m the first to trumpet the vigilance of the airport security people – it’s my wrinkly old derrière they are protecting – but I can’t really see how an 25ml of almost-but-notquite Lynx Africa can turn me from smelling like a 17-year-old at a youth club into a an international terrorist like the Carlos the Jackal oot of one of those 1970s airport thrillers.
Never mind – I just did what any self respecting, 70s-surviving , Geordie bloke would do; I slyly flitted aboot the duty free spraying myself with as many testers and samples as I could, until I smelled like Gok Wan on a first date.
(I think this lasted until somewhere over the former Yugoslavia, where my natural bits and pits odours began to wrestle control back).
By the way – why can’t we have a pound shop at the airport – can’t think of a better place to try and save money as the bargains of the duty free just distract us from the other retailers who have one hand in out pocket whilst making a sign with the other!
Some poor families spent more on sweets , suncream and the Sun than the Toon’s summer transfer budget – without the added bonus of feeling the inner peace that trousering twenty odd million poond brings as you grin your way through security.
The price of a cuppa, a paper and a kit kat at Manchester airport made the people who run the buffet cars on the trains look like charity workers; after purchasing my tea, copy of the Times (givvower I can read some of the words!) and a biccy, I apologised to the lass for only having a £20 note. “Then you’ll have to put something back” she scowled.
“Can I see your boarding pass?” Could she see my freakin’ boarding pass? Since when did Kirsty the daylight robber become the final line of defence in airport security?
As I turned away muttering, she put on a hideous smile normally reserved for ticketing traffic wardens and lottery winning exes.
She clearly knew about the airliner undead toilet effect; that I would soon experience. The what? I truly believe it will one day be scientifically proven that the worst a human being can ever look is when viewing themselves in an airliner nettie mirror.
Once that door clicks shut, the unique airborne loo lighting cruelly highlights every line, wrinkle, crevice, blemish, crease, zit and mole in your seemingly lifeless waxworks face.
You will never look this rough again!
Even your final journey on a mortician’s slab will see you looking perkier than this; it’s like you have been shown your own version of Dorian Grey’s portrait which, as the story goes, secretly ages in some forgotten attic.
Finally, maybe the rich and famous could be made to show us their airline nettie mirror pictures to make us feel better about ourselves.
We could use the proceeds to buy cups of tea and armpit spray at the airport shop. Boarding passes please... Mike is appearing at a charity night for Stroke North East at Newcastle Stand on Monday.