GOD, I love international air flights. The queue for the X-ray machine; the air hostesses with their spray-on smiles; the adrenalin rush of mid-ocean turbulence; the snoring, obese old man in the next seat with elbows in my ribs; the long wait for my complimentary nibbles; the free meals that all somehow taste the same; the 45 minutes' queue to get through immigration when they tell me I've failed to fill my form in correctly and will have to go back to the start again; the lost baggage
There's something wonderful about flying across time-zones, after I've failed to work out whether my clock should go forward or back and then simply surrender to a process over which I have no control. It's a kind of consumerist Zen or, perhaps, is
the equivalent of being in a nursing home, although the telly is better and the smell of food, sweating bodies and detergent is slightly less obnoxious.
It's the decompression from real time that I love. I am usually time obsessed, cramming as much as I can into a day. Even when on holiday I'm a control junkie, pressuring myself into relaxing, which by definition is failed from the start. 'Are you having fun yet? Try harder!' I find this waiting-to-unwind even more stressful than work. No matter how many palm trees or exotic birds there are, I usually come back more stressed than before.
True relaxation is getting harder to achieve. People take their laptops and mobile phones with them and check in with work back home. It's not an uncommon sight now: men with laptops on their knees at the poolside, calling long distance on their mobiles, flying into screaming rages as they get cut off when their minutes run out and they can't top up in a foreign country.
Apparently, 40% of British holiday-makers find holidays as stressful as a trip to the dentist, although I find the dentist quite calming as it's another opportunity to surrender. This time I am not making the same mistakes again. I shall not be taking 'a relaxing book to read' – I only ever re-read the first couple of pages of the damned thing, then discard it, disgusted with myself.
The other thing is chatting with other stressed out holiday-makers who talk about nothing more than how stressed they were before and how much they needed a holiday, right up until their final day, on which they get back on the plane and talk about how going home stresses them out.
No, the only time I truly relax is on the plane, when I can allow myself to do forbidden things, like wasting time; like watching really bad mainstream movies, with the latest CGI graphics. I'm really hoping that Air Mauritius will have Iron Man, as I'd be too ashamed to go to the cinema in Glasgow to see it, but the trailer kicks ass!
The only thing that worries me is that the eight hours won't be enough. I did a 22-hour flight last year to Australia and watched five movies that I can't even remember the names of and ate six packets of pretzels and was maybe never happier.
