Not that long ago, I did something that friends in Australia had been telling me to do for ages: take the 17-hour nonstop flight from Heathrow to Perth.
“It’s amazing,” gushed one, who had been among the first to try the route when Qantas started it last year and cannot wait for the even longer New York-sydney service the airline is due to start testing this week.
“It’s unbelievable,” said another, who turned out to be quite right. It was unbelievable. Unbelievably awful. So appalling that it should have turned me into a nonstop Qantas critic. Instead it did something quite different.
The trouble began with one of the passengers who boarded in London. He was a tall, middle-aged man from Queensland who had been travelling around Britain by himself for a month but had just had a rotten time trying to check in his luggage at the self-service desk at Heathrow, which was in his view pretty much a disgrace.
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I discovered this because I was seated on his right, and as we took off, he told me all about it. Then he told the man on his left. Then he pushed the button to summon a flight attendant and told him about it as well. By this time I had twigged that I was about to spend 17 hours trapped in a window seat in economy beside a man who had, as they say in Brisbane, a few ‘roos loose in the top paddock.
I did not take much notice at first because I had a more urgent problem: a tricky deadline that meant I would be working on holiday unless I used the flight to write. I fired up my laptop and began to type, until I became aware of an unpleasant vibration to my left. My neighbour was jiggling his leg so hard it was rubbing up against mine. He had also made a land grab for the space on the elbow rest between us that soon made typing impossible. “Would you mind moving your arm?” I asked. “What’s your problem?” he growled, clamping his arm in place.
There were 16 hours to go. He was big. I gave up typing, jammed on my headphones, shrank as far from him as I could and prayed for sleep. He put his headphones on too and must have found a music channel because just as I was dozing off, he began to jab his hands in the air and sing, loudly, to AC/DC. “I’m on the high! Way! To hell!” he bawled, oblivious to the shocked faces around him and the flight path to hell he was creating.
