Back to earth

I had no further incidents last night on the plane. I'd kind of hoped I'd be seated next to the oddly grumpy man with silly hair, but I was next to some gin-drinking Scots, so no problem there. Everyone could pick up a complimentary copy of the Daily Mail on their way on to the plane - it feels odd to describe the Mail as complimentary - although perhaps the repulsion it produces in me makes me hallucinate.

I'm convinced I saw a headline somebody else was reading stating that "25% of primary schoolchildren are ethnic". Which either means three quarters of children were produced in vats, devoid of any ethnicity and cultural baggage whatsoever, or the Daily Mail was trying to smuggle a sneery term in there for People Not Like Us. Which seems par for the course, but when I picked up a free copy myself, I couldn't find the article. I read through twice: it's a thankless task to go hunting for offensive material in the Mail.

Well, hunting for specific offensive material in the Mail.

I trundled around the airport for a little while, looking for my departure gate. It was finally announced half an hour later than expected, and when I boarded, the plane sat there until twenty minutes after the scheduled departure, with nothing being said and the cabin gradually getting hotter.

Eventually, the pilot announced there was a delay because of a fault with the landing gear. Which would be worrying if we were landing, but we were taking off: surely they had 12 hours en route to Hong Kong to put it right?

Hmm.

Perhaps this is why I'm not employed to ensure aviation safety standards are met.

We got out eventually, and once in the air I tried to watch Go With It, an Adam Sandler vehicle that was more like a car crash. If you could have a schmaltzy car crash. I lasted ten minutes before bailing out and watching Hall Pass instead, which was predictable to the nth degree but didn't seem to believe the mere sight of Adam Sandler was intrinsically cinematic gold. The guy next to me was laughing at Little Fockers. And farting. And being fat.

After that I watched a documentary about Jorge Lorenzo, who's the 2010 MotoGP champion, and apparently is not very pleased as a result. They film him having lunch, or going to bed, and throughout he just seems gloomy (apart from the footage of him as a precocious 6-year-old, when he just seems eminently slappable). Apparently he's very shy, but it made for depressing watching. When a highlight is a man being thrown off a motorcycle and breaking both his ankles, you're not in much danger of enjoying it.

We landed in Hong Kong a little bit roughly, but there was no ankle breakage. Or any more terrible films. Home, then the all-star show, where I had a Swiss woman in the front row to spray with my fresh-from-Geneva invective, and then to bed.