travelogue 20

I’ve got twitchy leg stuck up british middle class paranoid delusional brain hammers going on. which means we’re only over Greenland and I already need to walk up and down the aisle of this cantankerous 747, bashing people’s nasty open-plan headsets into their chicken or beef, just to get the blood clot to move down to my foot where I can stamp around on it a bit to make it less apocalyptic. but I don’t want to disturb the plebs in the aisle or center seats next to me. british. so I’ll have to wait until they have a bladder moment and haul themselves like cattle to the folding door in the sky, at which point I’ll climb over their piles of tangled useless electronica and blankets, snagging my walkman around the throat of the person in front of me who has reclined their seat into my pelvis and accidentally ripping their head off in my haste. I can’t even keep me seat upright, but I’m tensing up my whole body for 10 hours so that it doesn’t move backwards unnecessarily. you, person in front, however, took a mere 17 minutes to push the button marked “Push here to be extremely annoying. Please ensure that you push back real hard on the seat back, so that the person behind you who is bending over his tray table, filling out his visa waiver dilligently, will lose a couple of layers of skin from his forehead. Anyway you can’t really see anything on these seat back videos, so let’s get that their viewing angle down to about 45 degrees. How annoying would you like to be today? BA can help”. after I’ve extracted myself from the window seat – which I demanded, of course, notwithstanding the pain I now cause myself but I’m british that’s what being british is all about – I’ll stand by the toilets, stretching out my legs like I know what stretches will make a difference and then wait 5 minutes each time a person comes up to use the toilet before I tell them that I’m not actually in the queue. I love that game.

I’ll go back to my seat in a minute and prepare for the next 5 hours by shaking the seat in front of me really hard as I try to manoevere into my seat and then wonder why someone sitting next to their 5 year old would nonchalently watch The Departed, not really looking, while their child is wondering why the man that looks like the devil is smashing the other mans arm with a hammer or something and mummy, is he dead eeuw, what’s that brains guts high calibre firearms graphic and prolonged violent scenes I’m not sure sweetie are you hungry THE VIEWING ANGLE IS JUST FINE IF YOU’RE SITTING IN THE SEAT RIGHT NEXT TO YOU, YOU CAN SEE ALL THAT STUFF PERFECTLY, THAT’S YOUR CHILD RIGHT? AND PUT THE BLOODY SEAT UP.

I’m not compelled to watch anything this trip. I can’t really be bothered to get the julian clary book out of my bag. I’ll just listen to the bloc party album 8 times and take pictures of ice until I dissolve.