Lookin' up

The clear skies recently have given the great British public unobstructed views of a meteorite streaking across the night sky. This caused a lot of people to call the police, who duly logged the calls as ‘UFO nutbag’, ‘drunk’ and ‘fiery messenger of doom seen streaking towards Salford’. That the public responded by grabbing their phones rather than their cameras shows that the people behind ‘Stargazing Live’ probably have more work to do.

The meteorite was clearly visible because the sky, the very vault of heaven, was unobstructed by cloud. Certainly this is true at night, but not so much during the day. On a cloudless day, the perfect blue is criss-crossed with the vapour trails of jets. What’s amazing is the sheer number of them. I thought that there was supposed to be a recession on and that everyone was too poor to travel, and if they were travelling at all they were travelling by National Express, an experience so traumatic that one can only conclude that these things are usually chartered by Satan.

Looking up, one can’t help but try to picture what’s happening inside those metal tubes crossing the sky and criss-crossing each other’s path. Personally, I used to rather like aircraft travel. A few years ago international air travel used to consist of sitting in a seat and being brought endless, and free, snacks and alcoholic beverages while watching movies. Maybe life is still like that if you turn left rather than right on entering the aircraft, but for the mere mortals paying for their own tickets, the experience is now cramped, noisy and breathless, because to save on costs the airlines cut down on recirculating the fresh air, meaning that the majority of the air is actually recycled through flatulent tourists. And if you try to open a window, even on the ground, they get really sniffy.

Looking at all the snail trails of the fast moving machines, one wonders why so many people would choose to put themselves through that. Of course, alternative forms of travel have taken a bit of a knock reputationally recently, sea travel in particular. In the days of sail the main issue was scurvey and pirates. In the era of the great liners the main threat was icebergs, being snubbed socially or, imagining yourself among strangers, embarrassingly discovering that the purser you have been seeing in the aft lifeboat (not a euphemism) after dark has also been sucking off your village curate, unexpectedly also aboard, between bouts of quoits (again, not a euphemism). This means one of you will have to either stay in South Africa, or go over the rail.

Today the main threats to sea journeys tend to be pirates, running out of chips at the buffet, and the captain trying to do a handbreak turn round an island, at night, pissed, in a ship the size of a mega-mall. That a few weeks later the Costa Lista’s sister ship, the Costa Morra Insurancea Premiuma, then spent three days floating without power, was worrying to say the least. I don’t know much about cruise holidays, but I imagine that electricity is pretty important, not least because the recipe for ice is, as has been famously pointed out, water and electricity. There are only so many room temperature cocktails one can stomach before the ugly word ‘mutiny’ passes somebody’s lips. (By the way, the ‘mutiny’ is two parts rum, one part gin, lots of lime and a distress flare to garnish).

Private jets aside, first or business class probably still counts as luxury travel, involving sparkling wine, natural fibres and little snacks made from scarce ingredients from endangered habitats.

But the one great leveller of air travel, no matter what class you travel, is when you hit turbulence, in the toilet. It’s like being in a portaloo flipped by your drunk friends, if that tipping was happening in a giant blender, full of poo. If you hit an unexpected pocket while doing your business, chances are that you’ll emerge from the loo looking like pilthdown man but smelling much, much worse and resenting the hell out of all the selfish bastards who had chicken as their meal option.