Champagne is my idea of flying high

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AIR TRAVEL is rather like childbirth. Once it’s over you forget how awful it was. You even contemplate doing it again. In my imagination, you see, I swan into an airport with perfect make-up and a chic vanity case. I’m saluted by handsome airline pilots and gratefully accept a flute of champagne before take-off.

In practice I’m hot, flustered and ashenfaced, goaded by hatchet-faced security harridans; and unable to master the do-it-yourself check-in machines.

Those pictures of miserable holidaymakers last week at Gatwick and Heathrow, clobbered by both the threat of industrial action and IT failures, were a reminder of how awful flying has become. In the last couple of decade the no-frills airlines have made air travel relatively cheap but they certainly haven’t made it cheerful. And in

terms of comfort and facilities all the airlines seem to be competing in a race to the bottom, with either nasty food or no food on board and less and less leg room as they pack ever more of us in.

Last year I flew to Abu Dhabi in Club Class (I wasn’t paying, obviously) and it was the way flying should be. I may have missed the handsome, saluting pilots but there was a flute of champagne before take-off. I don’t normally drink champagne at nine o’clock in the morning, but needs must. The flight attendants treated me as though I was a fragile, infinitely precious semi-invalid. I could stretch my legs out and lie down (the greatest luxury of them all).

I’ve heard people say that they’re going to try not to fly to reduce their carbon footprint. That’s all very worthy but the reason that most people fly is to save time. When you only have a week’s holiday you can’t spend half of it travelling there and back. Though it occurred to me that a recent trip down France on the Eurostar was almost as quick as flying once you’d factored in the waiting and queuing at the airport. And much more enjoyable.

But when you arrive? Tourist haunts are unbearably crowded. Venice is a scrum, those deserted Thai beaches are anything but. In Barcelona there are regular anti-tourist protests. When you go on holiday you are seldom getting away from it all.

The very concept of a holiday is a relatively new one, as is mass tourism. Perhaps – for a variety of reasons – we’re approaching peak travel and soon the idea of flying thousands of miles to have fun will seem as anti-social as blowing cigarette smoke in a baby’s face.

But, sucker for punishment that I am, I might just squeeze in one or two more longhaul flights before that happens...

FOR THOSE whose hearts belong to Broadway, the drama series Fosse/verdon on BBC2 is a delight. The dancer/choreographer Bob (“Chicago”, “Cabaret”) Fosse, played by Sam Rockwell, is now the better known but in the 1950s and 1960s his sometime wife, the dancer Gwen Verdon (played by Michelle Williams) was the toast of New York musical theatre. I’m resisting bingeing on the series on iplayer. But only just. Meanwhile when nobody is looking I find myself giving a little shoulder roll and snapping my fingers. Life is a cabaret, old chum ....