Booze on jets? It’s the only way to cope with the madness below
WHAT a bunch of killjoys. A preflight tipple could soon be history, given ‘the rising number of hen and stag parties causing chaos on flights’. Lord Ahmad, the new Aviation Minister (can they please stop making people peers just for doing their jobs?), said he would examine whether relaxed airport drinking was ‘fit for purpose’.
There was talk last week of changing the rule that bars at Gatwick can open at 4am. Have you ever flown from Gatwick? It is peopled by holidaymakers and their awful children, who are allowed to wheel their own mini pink and spangled cases, bashing my ankles, in search of two weeks trying to contract skin cancer. Liver disease is the least of their problems.
As Bridget Jones, who was fond of chardonnay to numb her neuroses, would say: ‘Bugger off!’ Surely it’s more important the pilots are sober, not us? (Two Canadian pilots were arrested this month for allegedly being under the influence of alcohol before a flight from Glasgow to Toronto.)
All we do is sit in our seats, trying to watch Star Wars. Actually, I think there should be more alcohol available before flights, and during. I remember being on a flight to Islamabad and being told it was a dry flight, as I was flying to a Muslim country. I had cleverly stashed a bottle of dutyfree Laurent-Perrier in my hand luggage. I got out of my seat upon this news, asked Bossy Boots flight attendant to hand me my bag, and ceremoniously unveiled it. ‘Have you got a glass? Ice?’
‘No, you can’t open that,’ she told me. ‘It is against our beliefs. Nor will you be able to take it into the country.’
‘OK. Well, you have just served chicken to the overweight man squashed next to me. That is against my beliefs. I am deeply offended. I’m a Jain. I believe in wearing a mask when I go for a walk in summer, just to avoid inhaling flies. His dinner caused great misery. My glass of rather lovely bubbly harms no one. I am going to drink it. Bugger off!’
She didn’t let me drink it, despite the fact I showed her my press pass, which allowed me to speed through passport control in the Diplomatic Queue.
There were lots of Spaniards on my plane. Their speciality? Erecting tents and connecting water supplies… and the ability to secrete vast amounts of cava about their persons. Who were the bad people here, I wondered.
The entire time that I was in Pakistan, covering an earthquake, I would return to my luxury hotel, having seen babies dying from gangrene, and I was forced to sip pineapple juice when a vodka and tonic would have been so much more apt, so much more numbing. Drinking wine openly, I was told, would have been insulting. What I found insulting was seeing soldiers brandishing guns and doing nothing to help.
At least I stole all the bedding and blankets and water from a hotel trolley and took it to the victims by taxi.
HOW anyone can cover wars, famine and disaster in developing countries without alcohol is beyond me; no wonder my former colleague Marie Colvin, who was killed in Syria in 2012, was reputed to like a drink. It’s the only way you can cope with seeing children, just a few hours from Heathrow, dying naked on pavements.
I often think I have timetravelled several centuries when I journey to these places. No modern world would allow this, surely? Not when we have a black president, a woman prime minister. How can they live with themselves?
Alcohol isn’t the problem on flights. It’s the destinations. Let holidaymakers and newlyweds and war reporters and aid workers make merry for a while, 30,000ft above a world where it is the sober we really have to worry about.