The Flight

As you probably know, these days the police in London are allowed to shoot you in the head for just looking a bit shifty, so when they made the usual announcement about turning off mobile phones before the flight I didn't argue, particularly as it's not that long since most terrorists had accents like mine, and also because a few minutes before, the X-ray machine had spotted that my step-daughter was trying to smuggle a weapon onto the plane, in the form of a corkscrew with a little knife-blade attachment. Fortunately she's young, white, blonde and posh, so the authorities felt it wasn't necessary to kill any of us.

I don't really understand the concern over mobiles; airlines are always reassuring us about safety, to the extent that I firmly believe that the systems are so sophisticated that pilots are only really there to tell jokes and flirt with the cabin crew. Navigation? Plane steers itself. Forget all that following railway lines stuff, type in "Almeria" and you can do the Guardian crossword and then doze off for a couple of hours. Landings in poor visibility? No problem, computers do all that. I'll bet if I had a tenner for every pilot who's "landed" a plane with a stewardess sitting on his face I'd be a wealthy man. Or at least I'd have several tenners.

Get a phone call from your mother, however, and within seconds you'll be plummeting towards the Pyrenees wishing that know-all friend of yours hadn't explained to you that the "brace" position is only used because it's easier to identify bodies that have still got their heads on.

Uneventful flight, though. No drunks, no screaming babies, no praying nuns. Being Easyjet of course there was also no legroom, no in-flight movie and no free meal. On balance, though, I'm happy to pay five Euros for a slightly sweaty chicken baguette as long as they spend the profits on basic maintenance.