Who knows what about anything?

# 30

   If you haven’t yet seen ‘Tinker, Tailor …’[1] it can only be because you’re waiting for me to give it the Bus Lane Seal of Approval. Consider it done… there, I’ve stamped it: “APPROVED” – just don’t ask me to summarise the plot for you. I was doing quite well, following the ins and outs, until Trigger[2] turned up to assist George Smiley with his enquiries. Seems that Trigger[3] was working for MI5 all along… maybe that medal they gave him wasn’t just for looking after his brush so diligently after all[4]. In a week when media nitwits are nattering about Strictly Come X Factor it was just such a pleasure and a relief to experience entertainment made with such intelligence. It is not the film of the book[5]; it stands apart, a piece of work in its own right. And so it should, with John le Carré listed as one of its Executive Producers. (You probably knew that le Carré is French for ‘the square’ – I confess, I didn’t).

   If anything ‘Tinker, Tailor…’ is a film about looking. Smiley is both watchful and reticent. Nothing is ever perfectly clear, the focus keeps slipping. Everywhere there is mistrust and ambiguity. Early in the story, Smiley visits his optician and emerges with new spectacles – bi-focals with noticeably larger lenses. The colours are all muted, mainly shades of brown and grey and, because it’s the seventies, many scenes take place in a haze of cigarette smoke. The re-creation of time and place is perfect; from the ill-fitting, tweedy, three-piece suits to the self-adjusting suspension on Peter Guillam’s[6] Citroen DS. Scenes are often visited through windows, giving scope for reflections and the possibility of the watcher also being watched. At The Circus, people ascend and descend in a goods lift which displays a warning against losing one’s head. Within the maze of offices and archives, a ‘dumb-waiter’ ferries files mysteriously from floor to floor…but for whose benefit? Across the office, there is always someone listening on headphones. Are they listening to you, or to a phone-tap or to some previous conversation?

   I didn’t notice a name-check in the credits for a ‘focus-puller’ so perhaps it’s either (or both) of the Editor (Dino Jonsäter) and the Cinematographer (Hoyte Van Hoytema) who was responsible for the masterly changes in focus within takes, enabling attention to switch from the foreground to the distance and back. This technique practically reaches orgasm in the airfield scene where Smiley stands on a runway and reduces Toby Esterhase[7] to tears while a twin-engine plane comes menacingly in to land behind them. I don’t know what the safety margins were when they filmed that, but I hope it wasn’t all done afterwards by Framestore.

   Reviewers describe the movie as having ‘no moral certainty’, and they’re absolutely right. I don’t just mean Kathy Burke’s hilarious observation that the middle-aged inhabitants of The Circus were all seriously “under-fucked”. The wayward Ricki Tarr[8] is the perfect antithesis to the shallow certainty and one-dimensional idiocy of James Bond. Where 007 was all sophistication, sophistry and improbable violence, Ricki is scruffy, unlucky and real. When did we ever see James Bond call ‘M’ from a red telephone box with prostitutes’ calling cards on the window?

   Smiley believes Karla is flawed by fanaticism, Karla knows that George is flawed by his love for the faithless Anne. And he’s still got the inscribed cigarette lighter to prove it. The look of speechless desolation on Percy Alleline’s[9] face after the traitor has been exposed (along with his treasured Project Witchcraft) has to be seen to be believed. And The Mole? Of course it was aarrggghh[10] all along. Think Kim Philby.

  

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[1] ‘Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy’ Dir. Tomas Alfredson

[2] Yes, Trigger – the road sweeper from Only Fools & Horses.

[3] In ‘Tinker, Tailor..’ Roger Lloyd Pack plays Mendel, late of MI5.

[4] Google ‘Trigger’ – there’s a clip from the relevant episode on U-Tube

[5] Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy by John le Carré, 1974

[6] Benedict Cumberbatch

[7] David Dencik

[8] Tom Hardy

[9] Toby Jones

[10] Alright, it was Bill Haydon (Colin Firth) of course, Anne’s erstwhile lover to Smiley’s enduring distress.

Enjoy Until . . .

# 29

   Governments around the world have had a variety of concerns on their bureaucratic minds this week. Several, I hear, are running campaigns to discourage ‘celebratory gunfire’; fortunately not something frequently encountered in England. The dangers of firing Kalashnikovs into the air, Libyan-style, should be evident to anyone capable of releasing the safety catch. Gravity insists that what goes up must surely come back down. It’s not rocket science – or rather it is, but only at the most elementary level. A spent bullet, having reached the apogee of its trajectory, begins to descend from somewhere high in the sky. Returning to earth, it will achieve a terminal velocity of around 91 metres per second. (That’s close to 300 feet/sec before VAT). And terminal it most probably would be if it were to land on some unfortunate’s head.

So please, chaps, let’s go easy on those triggers.

   Meanwhile, here in the UK, it seems that research has shown the citizens to be easily confused and our government – unreliably watchful on our behalf – now wants to save us from getting baffled by ‘Use By’, ‘Sell By’, ‘Best Before’ and ‘Display Until’ date-stamps on packaged food. I wonder which of these we are thought incapable of understanding? They all seem to have quite plain and reasonably specific meanings. ‘Sell By’ and ‘Display Until’ are obviously stock-control parameters. Admittedly, ‘Best Before’ is slightly vague but the meaning of ‘Use By’ is pretty clear and it is possibly almost as effective as the traditional scratch and sniff techniques on which we previously relied. In these litigious times, we must not forget that the ‘Use By’ date is cited to protect the manufacturer rather than the consumer. With only a minor revision it would read ‘Sue By’ – so let’s have no more confusion in that regard.

   The predilection for date-stamping things is now extending away from food into areas where it is needed even less. You could apply ‘Tolerate Until’ to priests, politicians and all manner of similar irritants. I bought a bouquet of flowers in Sainsbury’s the other day and only later did I notice that the wrapper bore the dictum ‘Enjoy Until…’ Cut any flowers and their inevitable decay is accelerated, but the manner and visibility of the transitions from bud to full bloom and ultimately to withered stem reveals their essence, their poetry, indeed their ‘poiesis’. Do we really need to be told when to stop enjoying this process of revelation? And even if that were the case, how might we arrest our enjoyment on the date prescribed by Mr Sainsbury? Should we perhaps poke our own eyes out? And how does he decide the date of ‘Until’? Is it ‘until tomorrow’, ‘until the twelfth of never ’ or ‘until hell freezes over’?

Where is Auden when you need him? Imagine if Wistan had suffered the patronising indignity of finding an ‘Enjoy Until …’ date, rubber-stamped on his cut flowers. Rest assured, he’d have given them an Until for their money:

“…Till China and Africa meet,

And the river jumps over the mountain

And the salmon sing in the street,

‘I’ll love you till the ocean

Is folded and hung up to dry

And the seven stars go squawking

Like geese about the sky.

‘The years shall run like rabbits,

For in my arms I hold

The Flower of the Ages,

And the first love of the world.’

But all the clocks in the city

Began to whirr and chime:

‘O let not Time deceive you,

You cannot conquer Time.

‘In the burrows of the Nightmare

Where Justice naked is,

Time watches from the shadow

And coughs when you would kiss.

‘In headaches and in worry

Vaguely life leaks away,

And Time will have his fancy

To-morrow or to-day….”

The lines quoted above are from ‘As I walked Out One Evening’ by W. H. Auden and there is more besides if you didn’t already know of it.  During an evening stroll, Auden’s narrator hears two other voices declaim on conflicts between Life and Time. Auden’s habitual stoicism restores a measure of calm in the final stanza, without resort to celebratory gunfire:

It was late, late in the evening,

The lovers they were gone;

The clocks had ceased their chiming,

And the deep river ran on.

Read or re-read all fifteen stanzas and see if that doesn’t take the mind off gunfire, shopping and date-stamps for a while.

A feral over class?

# 28

   Someone has got some explaining to do; or at least some serious thinking as a prelude to offering a more convincing explanation. It’s just too easy – let alone wrong and gormless - to blame the riots and ‘our broken society’ solely on something they are calling ‘the feral under-class’. If there is an under class and their behaviour is indeed feral – presumably using feral as an adjective meaning untamed (cf feral cats) and uncultivated (cf wild flowers) – our starting point has to be that they did not make (or even ‘un-make’) themselves that way. The existence of consistent and enduring social relationships is a pre-condition for the process known as ‘socialisation’ to take place. It was ‘socialisation’ during our childhoods that prevented the rest of us from growing up ‘feral’. No recognisable social structure, no family life to speak of = no socialisation. Who was the British Prime Minister who said (Clue: in 1987) that there was no such thing as society? And then proceeded to do her (Clue) level best to smash any worthwhile social framework that did not conform to her own stridently petty bourgeois (Clue) mentality and her obsession with the private-self?

   It’s not as if we weren’t warned; as if no one saw what was coming. Alan Bennett was only one among many. In his play Forty Years On (first staged at the Apollo Theatre, London, in 1968) the Headmaster laments,

“We have become a battery people, a people of under-privileged hearts fed on pap in darkness, bred out of all taste and season to savour the shoddy splendours of the new civility.”

More than forty years have passed since Forty Years On and the comparison with battery chickens remains horribly accurate.

   Gradually during my lifetime the values I learned at school concerning mutuality and interdependence have been overwhelmed by notions of individuality and the accompanying imperative to seek immediate gratification. Qualities of loyalty, trust, self-discipline and commitment have all been shot to pieces or at best gone missing in action. The simplest adjective we have to describe the sociological concept of ‘the unrestrained self’ is selfish. At the end of his book The Corrosion of Character (1998), Richard Sennett wrote that a regime “which provides human beings no deeper reasons to care about one another cannot long preserve its legitimacy.”

   And staying with Richard Sennett; his masterly 1977 work The Fall of Public Man describes how, in the nineteenth century, wealth gave individuals commanding access to the public realm. By the middle of the twentieth century, however, wealth was increasingly being used to ensure protection from the public realm. With the post-war settlement here in Britain, there came the universal franchise, nationalised industries, state education, extensive public housing, the NHS and the rest of the Welfare State. In response to all this socialism, wealth immediately sought access to tax-consultants, holding companies, private trusts, off-shore bank accounts, private education, gated communities and private medicine. And the new morality that accompanied these new uses for wealth was the morality of the private self. It became a morality unrestrained by worries about neighbours, communities and the public good. It was a morality of individual greed which to any reasonable observer might seem to be no morality at all – to be borderline feral in fact.

   To date (September 2011), about 1,300 people have been before the magistrates on charges arising from the riots across England this summer. By comparison, only a handful of parliamentarians were taken to court in the wake of the 2009 parliamentary expenses scandal. The number facing charges was but a fraction of the more than 300 MPs and peers slapped on the wrists and allowed to pay back sums they had fiddled on their expenses. To the best of my knowledge, not one single banker or city-trader has been prosecuted in the British courts for the scandalous breaches of trust, the years of professional negligence, the total disregard for the public interest and the widespread dereliction of due diligence that preceded the financial collapse of 2007/8. Dodgy and immoral though the activities Sir Fred Goodwin and his ilk may have been, they apparently weren’t illegal and therefore can’t be prosecuted. Which is hardly surprising when you consider that it’s others of his ilk in parliament, in the law courts and at the Bank of England who make the laws and regulations in the first place.

   Deep down inside, banking depends on a confidence trick. It lends out money which isn’t really there. Thus, when the sub-prime shit finally hit the speculative fan, excremental bad-debt rained down on all the economies of the western world. Governments obediently pumped public money into the failing banks. It was the tax-payers who had to put all their futures in hock to bail-out the delinquents. Suddenly it was okay for private debt to become public debt. Five minutes later the same bankers were telling us that we were living beyond our means and had allowed sovereign debt to spiral out of control. Excuse me? Wasn’t it the bankers who’d been living beyond everyone’s means? No, apparently not, and so we now endure an indefinite period of austerity until the perpetrators decide the public deficit is under control. That’s surely some catch, that Catch-22!

   In recent blogs I have banged-on at length about the unethical behaviour of politicians, lawyers, journalists and newspaper proprietors. These are the very people who are now telling us that the rioters came from a generation who hadn’t been brought-up to know the difference between right and wrong. Oh yes? And James Murdoch, how sure are we that he knows the difference between right and wrong? Personally, I blame the parents – especially the absent father…the broken home…

   Now is the time to pre-fix a few professionals and corporations with the ‘f’ word; a time to talk of feral capitalists, feral bankers, feral lawyers, feral journalists, feral spin-doctors and feral politicians. A whole feral over class in fact.

Aerodrome, Aerodrome, wherefore art thou Aerodromeo?

# 27

Among many unnecessary things to have come to my attention during the past week, the decision of Collins to drop the word ‘Aerodrome’ from the next edition of their dictionary is the one I have found the most inimical and asinine. Apparently, in the opinion of some chinless researcher, the word has become obsolete. It will doubtless soon be followed into outer darkness by the words ‘Publisher’ and ‘Dictionary’.

Whether the plonkers at Collins get it or not, an aerodrome is a very special kind of place fully deserving a noun with a complex set of meanings and associations. Even at its simplest, an aerodrome is more than merely an ‘airfield’ and both are different in scale and purpose from an ‘airport’. Gatwick and Stansted are airports. Biggin Hill is an aerodrome.   An aerodrome has to be, primarily, a large expanse of short grass, with or without a permanent runway. It should have at least one hangar and preferably be surrounded by a hedge. From a distance, a faded orange windsock signals its presence. Ideally, the windsock is the first thing you see from a country lane until you get close enough to glimpse the movement of propeller-driven aeroplanes through gaps in the hedgerow. If you are lucky, a Tiger Moth or a Dragon Rapide will be taxiing close by and the hedge will sway and heave dramatically in the prop-wash as the pilot turns into the wind and revs for take-off. At twilight, grey wraiths wheel ghostly flying machines bearing names like Hawker, Avro, Supermarine, Fairey and Sopwith out from the shadows and prepare them for flight. If the sun’s going down and the cloud base is getting lower by the minute and you’re looking for a place to land your Auster Aiglet or DH Chipmunk by visual flight rules, using only a compass and manual controls then - whether Mr Collins likes it or not - what you’re looking for is an aerodrome.

The word comes, of course, from the Greek. Aeros  (air) and dromos, meaning a course for running races. It is a descendant of Hippodrome: hippos meaning horse combined with dromos - again. The French word is aérodrome and when you consider that the old Royal Flying Corps was operating on the Western Front when the RAF was formed in 1918, it clearly made sense to bring the word home. Even today, flights by British and French military aircraft over Libya are still termed sorties by both airforces, (from the French sortir – to go out).

The impending loss of ‘aerodrome’ is another depressing reminder of how impoverished the general public’s experience of flying has become. When did travel by aeroplane cease to be exciting, something to anticipate, to relish and enjoy? When did it crumple into the drab, dull, manipulated push and shove offered by Rien Air and Cheasy Jet?

There was a time – okay in my boyhood, long ago in the 1950s - when the prospect of flying caused genuine excitement. A thrill so great I sometimes had to run outside and stare up at the sky. The excitement was hardly lessened even if it was someone else who would actually be getting on the aeroplane. I can still recall a day when my family took Nana – my mother’s mother - to what was then London’s only airport at Heathrow. I was nine or maybe just ten years old. I was up at dawn, studying the high pink clouds, watching them float across the blue dome of the heavens like turreted castles and islands waiting to be explored. Flying promised to be the adventure that took you over the silver rim of a child’s horizon. The sky that morning looked ready for flight; Nana, regrettably, didn’t. Born in eighteen-eighty something, she was going to visit her sisters in Philadelphia. She had been there twice before, both times by sea. All the way to the airport she insisted that she didn’t hold with aviation; “If the Good Lord wanted us to fly, He’d have given us wings…” What a waste, I thought, letting her anywhere near an aeroplane.

For transatlantic flyers, Heathrow in those days consisted of a row of single-storey pre-fabricated huts, abandoned by the air-force at the end of the war. Inside these, I remember armchairs like those in our living room at home, cast-iron radiators and floors of scuffed brown linoleum. The few airlines on offer were represented by single desks, each displaying a small flag or a model aeroplane and a telephone. I coveted the models but would have settled for a flag. It was here that tickets were cursorily checked before passengers’ suitcases were carried - by hand - out through a single door at the back. And what a sight waited out there. Through the domestic scale, metal-framed, windows I glimpsed the slim elegance of a Lockheed Super-Constellation, beyond that a sturdy Douglas DC7 and taxiing in the far distance, the generous, gleaming, silver hull of an improbably large Boeing Stratocruiser. As it moved along, the Boeing dwarfed a line of Douglas DC3 Dakotas – or “tail-draggers” as they were being called because they lacked the nose wheel of more modern, post-war, designs. Mind you, there was one spectacularly daft effort – the early versions of the De Havilland Heron – which had a modern nose-wheel, but one which couldn’t retract. You could always identify a Heron – it droned across the sky appearing to have a drip of snot perpetually hanging from its nose.

In the far off ‘50s at Heathrow North, ‘Security’ and ‘Passport Control’ were at the far end of the hut where a man in uniform waited beside one of those waist-high rope barriers you still see sometimes in banks and post offices. Here, passengers said their goodbyes to the relatives who had accompanied them in droves. The experience of flying was such a novelty that everyone wanted to be in on it, even if all they could hope to do was just to wave and sniff, taking in the glamour and excitement of it all. Eyes were dabbed with handkerchiefs (no tissues in those days) and then we relatives obediently stood aside. The man unclipped the hook at the end of the rope and beckoned the anointed traveller through. No questions, no searches, they just had to be clutching a passport and a ticket. 

Afterwards, everyone left behind stood on the grass outside the huts and watched through the wire fence as friends or loved ones were guided in a wandering crocodile across the tarmac to the mobile stairway which would lead them up, up and away into the cabin of their airliner.

My first chance to fly across the North Atlantic came sooner than I’d dared to hope. In the summer of 1960 I flew with my sister Sue to visit our parents in Washington DC which, in those days, didn’t even have an international airport. Eero Saarinen’s graceful terminal building for the new John Foster Dulles airport was then only at the design stage. So we flew to Baltimore instead. The airline had to be BOAC (British Overseas Airways Corporation; also known, fondly, as ‘Better On A Camel’). Our plane was a De Havilland Comet. The 4b version was newly into service by then and was still proudly the world’s first commercial jet-powered airliner. In England, the Boeing 707 was still only an approaching rumour.

Our little Comet probably carried about fifty or sixty passengers. Its successor, the 707, carried at least twice that number and became the definitive symbol of 1960s jet-set style and glamour. The gangway descending from a Boeing forms the essential backdrop to so many photos of Frank Sinatra, Liz Taylor, Sophia Loren…and eventually, The Beatles. Nowadays, lurking paparazzi snap celebrities in some generic VIP lounge or clock them strutting self-importantly past the throng of plebs filling the airport concourse. The actual aeroplane is no longer the all-important confirmation of their celebrity status because the airliner has lost its glamour. How do you get excited about an Airbus? It’s a flying tube. Getting on an Airbus 320 or a Boeing 737-800 at Gatwick has about the same allure as taking the Northern Line from Tooting Bec on a wet Monday.

All those years ago, on that forever shining summer morning, our tiny Comet fled west from Heathrow but at first only as far as Shannon on the Atlantic coast of Ireland. There, it took on board as much fuel as it could carry, metaphorically drew a few deep breaths, ignited its four Rolls-Royce Avon gas turbines, and roared into the sky. We climbed steadily away from the rocky coast, out over the estuary and the steel-grey ocean, up through the clouds until everything below us was white and everything above was blue. Only the tapering sweep of our wings remained reassuringly silver.

At Gander in Newfoundland, with the tanks drained of all but the maker’s name, we skimmed in low across the endless pines and landed gratefully to refuel. There followed a leisurely progress down the East Coast to Idlewild (now JFK) outside New York. Next, a stumpy-winged Lockheed Electra whined into the air and flew us down to Baltimore via – for some unaccountable reason – Wilmington in Delaware. But I didn’t care; flying was magnificent and the more take-offs and landings that were on offer, the happier I would be.

Those scruffy pre-fab huts at Heathrow North, the nationalised BOAC and its fleet of blue, white and silver Comets and Bristol Britannias all belonged to the post-war years of government-sponsored ‘Civil Aviation’. Now of course, in these modern, privatised and de-regulated, times the word civil (which does at least imply a semblance of courtesy) no longer applies as any sort of prefix to commercial aviation. The travelling public have become just so many credit cards waiting to be rinsed. Passengers are quantities to be searched, scanned, monitored, categorised and processed by airlines and airports. ‘Extra Charges’ pop-up here, there and everywhere so that operators can recover the margins given away to set the initial bait of low cost fares. Modern airports seem designed to sort, muster and control travellers as if they were tins of beans on conveyor-belts in a supermarket warehouse. Ideally, they’d like to palletise each plane-load of travellers, throw a net tightly over the lot, and load us via the cargo-hatches using a gigantic fork-lift.

Airports seem wilfully designed to deny travellers any view of even parked aircraft, let alone the runways. You might just see the nose cone and cockpit windows of your waiting Airbus shortly before you are expelled down some featureless tube straight into the aircraft’s cabin.

When and where did it all go wrong? Was it just me getting older that took the fun, the thrill and even the sense of anticipation out of flying? Only Peter Pan can fly forever with a child’s imagination, but am I wrong to want air travel to be more sensational than a journey into London on the 159 bus? We can’t just blame the impoverished experience on the advent of low-cost carriers. I flew to New York on Freddie Laker’s DC-10 Sky-Train in the early eighties and that wasn’t so grim. And the staff weren’t all entirely indifferent or plainly bored out of their skulls.

Airports seem to be run on the principle that security is only tight when it causes as much inconvenience as possible to as many people as possible. As a strategy to protect the public it is both blunt and gormless. The searches, the x-ray scanning of bags and making everyone remove their trouser belts and shoes and earrings…what does that do?  Are we so witless that we cannot look along a line of two hundred passengers waiting for a holiday flight to the Algarve and point to the six who it might be wise to search? Why are we searching the other 194 and making grannies remove their shoes and young mothers hold up their baby’s bottle in a transparent plastic bag? If they only searched three in every hundred passengers they might at least search them properly. Instead, they search everyone equally badly. Grannies and granddads from Romford heading for Marbella with the grandchildren, are they likely to want to blow up the plane? I don’t think so – they wouldn’t threaten anyone, except maybe on a Saturday night down at the Dog & Bucket when they’ve had a few and West Ham have lost at home…again.

Every airport concourse should display a banner quoting the line Berthold Brecht gave to Arturo Ui; ‘We only want what’s best for you, and we know best what’s best for you.’ Manage your expectations downwards; forget all about comfort or excitement. Shut your mouth, close your eyes and open your wallet. From the moment you arrive at the departure airport to the moment you leave your destination airport you can forget all about comfort, enjoyment and dignity. They have all gone and will never return. Accept that you will wait endlessly in line for no apparent reason, or else be left fretting on uncomfortable chairs in overcrowded waiting areas. You can’t call them lounges (no ‘comfort’, remember?) and they are dominated by unnecessary ‘shopping opportunities’ – as if you aren’t already hauling enough crap to last the fortnight.

When your flight lights-up “Boarding” on the departures screen you begin the long trudge to an always distant gate. Accept that your plane will never go from any of the first 20 empty gates past which you have to trundle before finding the one allotted to you. Turn off your mind and accept tedium – the cabin-crew and ground staff of your airline already have, it’s the only way they can get through their working shift. They will herd you like cattle at the boarding gate, slowly checking your boarding passes and passports. When they are feeling particularly bored or grumpy they will pick on passengers at random and make them try to fit their hand luggage into the prescribed iron cage. If your bag fails to fit without a struggle expect to be publicly humiliated and charged an extra thirty or forty quid per bag. Cough up and in return you get to wait at the other end of the flight for your bag to be off-loaded (hopefully) and dumped onto a carousel – unless it’s now en route to Yokohama by mistake. Oh joy!

There follows another long wait which remains forever unexplained. Then you queue again to have those same boarding passes and passports checked. This is in case you have changed your identity or destination since they were last checked – at the other end of the same room. Stay calm and shuffle down the airless, sloping, tube which connects to the aircraft’s cabin. Here, the flight crew await. Just a glance at their poor skin conditions and podgy figures will shoot-down any lingering confidence you had in this ‘no frills’ airline. Before you can be seated, your paperwork is checked again. This is a precaution lest your DNA has reconfigured itself in the sloping tube and you have become someone else.

Finally, reluctantly, you turn and face the long, wide, low-ceilinged, cabin. No matter how far forward you thought you were in the queue, the plane is always already crowded. How did all these burly buggers get here first? You may well ask. They don’t waste time allocating seats anymore; apparently random seating is not much more time-consuming than any other method of filling the plane. Give up. “Sit down and belt up,” is the next instruction, followed by the improbable pantomime of the safety announcement – including totally not-reassuring details about lifejackets and oxygen masks. “…and follow the illuminated dots on the floor to the exits – which on this A320 Airbus are located here and here…” (Watch where she’s waving her arms, you idiots). The best you can hope for is that this grotty tube will get you to your destination without requiring additional oxygen, bracing yourself in the crash position or having to swim for it.

Between them, the security people, the airport managers, RienAir and CheasyJet have successfully kicked the proverbial out of any sense of adventure, romance or even enjoyment that once belonged to air travel. They advertise themselves as ‘No Frills’ and the experience they offer certainly delivers on that. And, sadly, there are now No Thrills either.