Recent events both aeronautical and financial have been daunting enough to scare anyone off banks and aeroplanes forever. Forced however to do some time in the national capital, I found myself flying home last week via Melbourne: unless you depart at dawn or after sunset, you can't fly Canberra/Adelaide direct; you change in Melbourne, or Sydney, or possibly Luanprabang, or forget it.
I resolved to use my air time to think deeply about the global crisis. If I'm going to be 'on the brink of systemic meltdown' I want to know what exactly that means and where better to grapple with this conundrum than 37,000 feet up in the air precariously jousting with a different kind of brink?
So, with an array of gloomily headlined morning papers, a heavy heart, light head, average knee and sluggish liver, I boarded what the pilots call 'our short flight down to Melbourne'.
Just my luck though. Having secured as always an aisle seat as far forward as possible, I find myself alongside a very large person, or, not to put too fine a point on it, grossly fat — a key player in one of the other crises of our anxious times: obesity.
His wife is small, but she takes the window. He, like many large people on planes, immediately overflows the middle seat and our shared armrest. Then he positions his newspaper so that it cuts out the sunlight (which in any case his wife, being not only small but apparently light-sensitive, cancels fully by pulling down the shade).
As for me, I'm leaning so far into the aisle that the pilot can hardly see to back out.
An idea I've had, which I intend to pass on to the appropriate philosophers who plan our wellbeing in the skies, is to take a line from clothing measurements and have Economy Class XOS. Every few rows, they could have not three seats but one XOS (probably about double size) alongside one ordinary economy squeezy.
During the safety demonstration I consider the problem presented by my adipose companion. Not wishing to look like an aeronautical neophyte, I generally don't watch the safety demonstration — I already have noticed that all aeroplanes 'subtly' differ from each other — but I have to admit to a sneaking regard for the Life Belt instruction which involves complex references to tags, tapes, passing things round your waist and