The world at our feet and we complain about head rests

In the 12th century, a period to which all comment writers eventually return for inspiration, the average man, on foot and with luggage, might travel nine miles a day on land, and the English Channel could kill you, as Henry I discovered in 1120, when the cream of the English nobility drowned in the White Ship just outside Barfleur, and ignited the first English Civil War.

The nobles were drunk, such was their ecstasy at travelling in the floating early-medieval equivalent of a Boeing Dreamliner; in that sense they were modern, like those idiots who prop up the bar in Virgin upper class, a pit at the front of the aircraft, comically designed to look stylish, and failing utterly. There is no such thing as stylish air travel – everyone is in a metal tube, no matter what they tell themselves, and that is how it should be.

And so I take no side in the British Airways reclining seats conversation, which wonders whether the company was right to abolish reclining seats on short haul flights, as it has; or, rather, I am on both sides. I can imagine that it is irritating when someone lowers their head into a space near your face, all the more so if no brave soul can stand to put up with it, and so a domino of reclined seats is sent rippling down the cabin, creating maximum annoyance. I can, equally, imagine that someone so protective of their face-space that they object to another reclining their seat for a short period – as is absolutely their right, or was – is also irritating.

But before both sides suffer a bout of air-rage and get themselves thrown off a plane (or, more likely for BA passengers, sit there seething), they should remember the point of air travel – that it is a gift given, so far, to just a few generations. A few hundred years ago the average person might never have left their village, except to stare at cows. Charlotte Brontë once wrote of a trip to Manchester; she didn’t even see the sea until she was 23, and then it was the North Sea.

Now huge numbers of us are able to go everywhere she did not: Rome; Istanbul; Beijing. Even huger numbers don’t. They go instead to Dubai, or Tenerife because it’s hot in January or any one of a vast number of alternative destinations to which they voyage purely in pursuit of leisure. They can see the wonders of the earth if they so choose, or they can lounge around doing nothing but defying the seasons. And what does the voyager do with this near-miraculous opportunity? Moan about the small things. British Airways isn’t posh any more, say some. They charge for coffee.

And so, whenever I am in an airport, no matter how squalid or oppressive – and I can see that airports are a rehearsal for tyranny, testing the limits of human ability to withstand petty bureaucracy and queuing – I have no patience with anyone who complains about it. I want to shake those demanding vouchers, or compensation, or access to equally ugly fake-posh lounges due to some small delay and say – can you not marvel? Do you know that just a few years ago you would have travelled by donkey, and crossed the great seas on rickety wooden boats all too closely resembling the White Ship? What is wrong with you? Why are you complaining? At this point I would probably be arrested but, even so, I am right.