There is nowhere left to hide. That priceless blessing and evil scourge of the 21st century, the internet, has now reached the sky.
I'm on a flight from Sydney and am sitting next to an Australian woman returning to her parents' homeland in Europe to visit family. She's terrified of flying, she tells me. I comfort her — I am used to holding the hands of people on planes who fear they are about to die. I ask her about her heritage and about her parents' country of birth. I try to distract her from the jet-scream rising beside us as engines race and air whooshes and we're lifted up into the sky. She stares terror-eyed and disconsolate out of the window. She's left her boyfriend down there.
But wait! She's brought him up here with her, too!
We're still strapped into our seats and bulleting into the ether when she grabs her mobile phone from her handbag and dials his number on Facetime. But the call won't connect. She punches the phone frantically, becoming more distressed as the plane approaches altitude.
'The only reason I booked a flight on this airline,' she wails 'is because they have wi-fi!' I had no idea. It's the beginning of 2018 and though I've heard of on-board wi-fi, I've never before encountered it. Could it be a thing?
As 2018 rumbles on, I discover that it most certainly is: airlines like Qantas, Virgin, Delta and Emirates announce that they're rolling out wi-fi on certain flights, and testing it on others. Some flights offer limited data free of charge, while others attach hefty price tags to their service. Wise airlines (unlike this wretched carrier) allow streaming while denying access to Skype and Facetime. Months later, I find myself trying out the complimentary service on a different flight (for research purposes, of course). It's like wi-fi in the 1990s: patchy and unreliable.
But who wants wi-fi up in the air anyway? Until the recent arrival of in-flight internet connectivity, flights presented one with a rare opportunity to momentarily escape real life and forget it ever existed.
"The work-a-day world is threatening to intrude even as we board the plane: 'urgent' emails will ping into our inboxes; news headlines will scream for attention; children will message asking where their tennis shoes are."
Boarding the plane, I would shrug off the troubles that grounded me to the material world and wait for that peculiar sense