After a horrible flight, I felt the incredible urge of producing a rant. It became this. Feel free to comment and pick out any language error.
The worst flight of my life, or… Homebound Horror
A defamatory pamphlet
Tuesday, April 30th.
On the regular Brussels-Faro-Brussels flight, things didn’t exactly go as planned. There was an annoying kid at Jerez Airport, a small stop at a regional airport, but in retrospect, that was the least of my problems. It was a two-leg flight, Faro, at least for us, was a 50 min. stopover. On entering the plane, we were told just to pick an empty seat, which was just the usual bad organization. So we sat down in aisle 29, I read a bit in the airline magazine and noticed Jetairfly had recently purchased 2 Embraer E-190 planes. The leg to Faro took about 30 minutes. After all the Faro-passengers had disembarked, we were ordered onto the seats dictated on our boarding pass. We had 26 A-B-C. What we found there was simply shocking. It was obvious that a British person had occupied my seat. On the floor was a napkin, a piece of paper inscribed with the contact information of the Early Learning Centre in Watford, Hertfordshire, half a croissant (bitten, not cut), and a few crisp-like snacks. The pouch on the seat in front of my mother was stuck to the seat, courtesy of a blob of chewing gum. The tensioning bit of my seat belt had been nibbled on and salivated on by a child, as it was still a bit moist. And there was still a vague smell of a sandwich with eggs, bacon, spam, sausage, spam, spam, spam, beans, spam, spam, spam, spam (lovely spam, wonderful spam), and ham.
“It can’t get any worse”, you say? Well…it did. We were seated in front of a mother with twins. Two little hyperactive little bastards who were kicking the seat and slamming the trays even before we took off. So I did what every other normal human being would do in such a case: I stuffed my fingers as far up in my ears as possible. The overhead TV’s deployed in perfect unison and displayed maps, airspeed, distance to destination, altitude, and other similar things. Then, again came the pleasant thundering noise from the engines and we were in the sky. To keep my mind off things, I took a book (I had a Giacomo C., a Nero, a XIII, and Carthago with me, so I was well stocked). Nevertheless, the harassment continued…
The reading was to no avail. They kept yapping and, dare I say, even fighting. My brain became ridden with thoughts on how these cretins could be silenced… One way was to stick their heads in the toilets and flush. And then, when the flight was half way, it happened: are we there yet? Are we there yet… those 4 words one utters so much as a child and get under the adult’s skin. I lost it. The moment where I would turn around and give them a verbal clobbering was getting ever so close. In the meantime, I found a title for a mandatory in-flight book: “How to disintegrate twins while on a plane for dummies”, and I was considering to charge the cockpit and ask the pilot to drop to 10.000 feet and open the door, so I could have the immense pleasure of lobbing a toddler to the ground.
Unfortunately for me, my mother intervened, thus saving the two oafs from an almost certain, squishy death. It did work, though… A bit. Soon they were back at it. Forget Guantanamo, I’d prefer being keelhauled on a supertanker than having to go through this torture. Then my father, mercifully, gave me his tablet to listen to a BBC Radio 4 documentary. To stay within the current context of accidentally brutally murdering someone, I chose the Battle of Bannockburn. This calmed me to some extent, at least until the landing started. It was the first time ever that I felt the urge of kissing the floor once we got into the airport.
