Esq.

In their wisdom the Department of Homeland Security have recently made it very clear that from now on air travelers must make every effort to insure that the name on their tickets and boarding passes must be exactly the same as they appear in your passport. No doubt this is prudent, but it is also fraught with difficulties. The names in my passport, my names, are (in the right order) Angus Alexander Geoffrey Trumble. The name on my ticket and boarding pass is usually Angus Trumble, occasionally Angus A. Trumble, but never to my knowledge Angus A. G. Trumble. So far all this has gone without comment, but yesterday in Terminal 3 at Heathrow, the American Airlines automatic check-in machine took it upon itself to amend my name to TRUMBLEESQ/ANGUSA. This desperately unhelpful locution very nearly prevented me from traveling, and it was only after much increasingly abject (but always respectful) groveling to the security man that I managed to establish that I am who I am, and that this was indeed my ticket. Afterwards, the airline representative could offer no explanation for why all this occurred, other than that I must have done it to myself. “No, not true,” I protested as politely as possible. Naturally no-one in Terminal 3 has ever heard of “Esq.,” and I cannot remember the last time this archaic tag was ever applied to me, even in jest by members of my immediate family—certainly never in America, where ironically “Esq.” still does exist, viz. as an oddly unisex signifier for attorneys who are authorized to practice in certain jurisdictions including Connecticut. The only way out of this strange predicament was to give the security man my solemn assurance that in future I would ahead of time somehow obtain from American Airlines confirmation of the exact spelling of my own name. Upon much reflection since then, I have decided that it will be far easier to use another, less tiresome airline. I also wondered if the red poppy I was wearing in my lapel made any difference. Evidently not, because at the departure gate I was searched with unnerving thoroughness down to the ticklish soles of my feet. KAFKAESQ/FRANZ, eat your heart out.

O tempora, O mores

Air travel has been intolerable for years, but this morning for me the process sank to new depths. Since 9/11 I have navigated security and boarded innumerable aircraft all over the world, but never before have I had my tube of toothpaste confiscated. Clearly I had no choice but to submit to this impertinence today in Montréal, Québec, but the grounds upon which my toothpaste tube was impounded were not that it might conceivably contain plastic explosives—or any other contraband—but simply that it exceeded the allowable volume (expressed, somewhat pointedly, in milliliters, and in appalling French). The fact that my toothpaste tube was quite obviously three-quarters empty… ça ne marchait pas. A little later, queuing forlornly towards U.S. customs and immigration, a tall, middle-aged man—Canadian passport, je regrette—passed the time by clipping his fingernails. Each painstaking snip rang through the hangar-like space with eye-watering reverberation, made worse by the thought of that horrid trail of new-mooned leavings under foot. I have rarely seen anyone exhibit such complete disregard for the boundary that used to separate behavior that is suitable for public places from behavior that is not. How do people learn to forget that distinction? Reflecting presently upon this strange incident somewhere over New Hampshire or Vermont, I wondered how many other travelers were as revolted as I was, offended, or merely incommoded by this performance. It is not unusual to see the occasional, leathery old slapper filing her nails on the train or at the departure gate, so I suppose someone might therefore make a sort of case for tolerating the more radical process of clipping them also. The difference is, of course, that filing mostly produces less noise, and only a little dust.

Airports

When, five hundred million years ago, having formed in the oceans, primitive vertebrates crawled through sand and slime, paddled up creeks, streams and rivers, slithered out of swamps to higher ground, and those most basic, yet revolutionary physical characteristics—the backbone, jaws, limbs, and the ability to reproduce on dry land—provided the key to the evolution of intelligent life on Earth... Norman paused to sip from his unsatisfactory cup of tea, and looked out the window. He blinked. After all this happened, what, I wonder, thought Norman, do we make of the fact that so many of the very places in which this magnificent transition took place are now airports? He looked at his watch, and glanced towards the departure gate. The bog and the fen, marsh and estuary: Here, unwittingly acting on our behalf, those primitive, monstrous fauna literally took the first fishy footsteps that over many millions of years ultimately led to the exquisite concoction of homo sapiens... Norman had always fostered a certain self-indulgence in respect of his chain of thought, and this reverie was no exception—in other words big on panoramic sweep, but as some of his colleagues regretted, rather long-winded. Fortunately that bit about the exquisiteness of homo sapiens collided with the arrival of a group of scowling flight attendants. In other words, mused Norman after wincing at the distraction, how curious, how extraordinary even that the very same places in which our great ponderous unthinkable beast ancestors first made landfall are these days so often the perfect spot, the ne plus ultra of an airport. What does it mean? Bing, bong.

The Qantas Airbus A380

The Qantas Airbus A380, the only one currently in service, was not nearly as horrible as I thought it might be. First, it is surprisingly quiet. They have sound-proofed it very effectively. Second, they make you feel as if you are only wedged into a normal jumbo, and not something with almost as many people crammed in upstairs. Psychologically, this is achieved by preventing any contact between the two decks. First and Business are upstairs; Bergen Belsen is down.

Whether or not this is because it is so immensely big, or some technical trick, the aircraft does seem very stable, and it gives you a nice soft landing. It is somewhat irritating that even brand new airport terminals are ill-equipped to handle it, so it takes nearly a quarter of an hour to get the bridges into position, and an eternity to disembark. I rather wish they would just use regular stairs as in the old days, and Air Force One (come to think of it), and not the sagging old aluminium concertina arrangement on wheels. Who are those indolent hobbits who stand about on the land-side when you disembark? The airlines refer to some of them as "agents," but more often they have that sullen Guantanamo flavor.

One of the mystifying aspects of air travel is the enormous gulf that separates the entirely fictitious picture the airlines peddle in their publicity of caring, compassionate, and incidentally attractive young flight attendants fluffing pillows, adjusting blankets, etc. - whose aim is to secure your comfort and safety - and the elderly, bad-tempered recovering alcoholics (at best) for whom the passengers are there either to be ignored, or given a harsh dressing down. The bizarre navy-blue apron and officious change from high heels to dominatrix flats is the only forlorn remnant of any concept of service, feebly shored up by the unctuousness of the scripted public address announcements. They hope we have enjoyed this flight. They must be joking, or else they are laboring under the influence of mind-altering drugs. These announcements might make a difference if the purser, a person evidently chosen through decades of jeal0usly accumulated seniority, actually learned to read aloud. Functional illiteracy appears to be a severe problem for Qantas.

More usually, back in the trenches, the flight attendants bark orders, read magazines, go upstairs to lie down (there's a little hutch, just for them, up a secret staircase beside the starboard bog), trade gossip about their slapper co-workers, and toss out plastic trays of inedible reconstituted lumps of mutant hen languishing in goo. No beef, sorry. They deliberately aim to hit your elbow with their ancient, germ-laden trolleys. You really could not satirize it, because whatever you wrote the truth would still be worse.

One can only assume that the reason that economy cabins function as they do is that no self-respecting airline executive has set foot in one for at least thirty years.

Reg Ansett was right when he called his unionized hosties "old boilers."

Now they really are old, hardened by decades of drunk rugby teams and stress-induced bad behavior. But I do wonder how much of the bad behavior is the product of treating us like subnormal children on an institutional picnic. To make matters worse, at the other end they get fast tracked through immigration, and expect their passengers to stand aside to make way for their bags on wheels - bags which, incidentally, take up quite a lot of room in overhead lockers that is more properly intended for passengers' belongings. Woe to he who dares to shift even an inch these groaning panniers of tax-free contraband. When was the last time a flight attendant's bags were thoroughly searched?

At Los Angeles I saw a flight "crew" bustling about getting ready to abuse yet another plane load of hapless travelers. Honestly, they had chopsticks in their hair. Are we supposed to be impressed by that?