On the joys of travelling by air
I am one of the lucky few who enjoy long-distance air travel. Even the most annoying aspects of it are agreeable to me on at least some level: I don't mind the mind-numbing boredom, the endless waiting, the inhospitable airports with their unceasing noise and glaring fluorescent lighting. I don't even mind the food.
The origins of this strange preference can be traced back to an experience I had at the age of five, when we went on a rare transatlantic family visit.
It was utterly unlike anything I had ever known, and it made a big impression. Having never even been outside in the dark before, I remember the brightness of the traffic lights as we waited for the bus in the early hours of the morning. I remember the intense lemony smell of the moist napkin that I was issued on the plane. I remember the snow falling from a black Canadian sky in dazzling quantities, backed by the rumble of the airport escalators.
What I remember most of all is being adrift in a sea of time; plenty of adults get antsy when they board a plane and nothing seems to happen for the next hour, but at the age of five a period like that takes on a biblical character.
Air travel is the great leveller. Few of us do it often enough to get comfortable with it. The airport is the natural home of the bewildered. Even if you are very familiar with your home airport, at the other end of the journey you are likely to be a stranger. People do things differently there.
These days, I have the good fortune of travelling to the other side of the world and back every year, for the best possible reasons.
During my last trip, I had about nine hours to observe the behaviour of my fellow passengers from my usual vantage point of an extra legroom seat, which offered me an excellent view of the lavatories.
There are two types of passengers: those who do not know how to lock the lavatory door from the inside, and those who cannot work out how to open the lavatory door at all.
This time I got to observe what happens when members of these two groups meet. One of the former group was inside the lavatory, door unlocked, and a passenger of the latter group was trying to make his way in. He was making no progress; all he would have had to do was gently push in the middle of the door to get it to fold inwards, but he tried just about everything else, pushing and pulling on various bits to no effect.
This is no reflection on his character. Nobody is born with the knowledge of how to operate an airplane lavatory door. They are different from every other door one encounters in life, and how they work is just one of those things we all have to figure out for ourselves, hopefully with our dignity intact. Once inside, how to operate the lock is not obvious either, but surely the first thing most of us do is look for the mechanism before we feel it is safe to sit down. One feels for the poor souls who give up on this quest.
(The bane of my existence is the myriad of different flushing, drying and soap dispensing mechanisms airport designers love to install in the lavatories. I find myself twisting things that look like knobs but aren't, waving my hands in front of sensors that turn out to be knobs after all, unaided by confusing signage and the fact that at least 50% of these implements are broken at any point in time.)
Midway through his fumbling, our hero heard the occupant flush the lavatory, and immediately he lowered his arms and stepped back, sudden triumphant understanding dawning on his face. Clearly the reason he couldn't open the door was because it was locked from the inside!
The occupant came out of the lavatory soon after, helpfully holding the door open for his fellow passenger who gratefully went in.
Two wrongs made a right that day, and nothing was learned.