Flights of fancy

I'm back in London, rested, broke and ready for anything except work, apparently. As long as I can slink off to bed at a decent hour, that is. The dreaded monster of jet lag, which only left me alone in Melbourne after a few friends dragged me, kicking and screaming all the way, out to a pub until 3 a.m, is once again raising its extremely ugly head. But I will fight on...if only because there's a big design-related free party on Monday which will hopefully cure me of the lag, even if it does cause some other problems.

It was a long flight back. Or it felt that way to me. On a trip that was emotionally charged thanks to my homesickness, I wasn't really in the mood when told by the check-in girl that I had to either remove 4kg from my luggage or pay through the nose for it. It seemed illogical to me that I should have to put it in my carry-on where it might cause an injury to someone (or rather instant death, given how heavy my carry-on already was) by falling out of the overhead locker and landing on someone. It was still going to be on the same plane, after all. But I still trudged my way through her instructions, ending up with the lightest baggage I've ever checked in on a flight back to Australia. My record is 33kg, a full 10kg over the limit - but still no excess fees, thanks to being tired and, without even meaning to, turning on the tears. Amazing how well that works when it's a guy on the receiving end; women are far less sympathetic.

So there I was, with 15kg resting gently over my head and watching the safety announcements. I was parked at the very back of the plane, along with all the other cattle who couldn't afford the equivalent of a deposit on a small house to fly to the other side of the world, when I discovered there is more than dollars (or pounds) involved in the difference between cabin classes. On the new Qantas A380s (I'm a geek for knowing that, yes, but it's a new plane and I was excited. And besides, I AM a geek, so of course I knew what plane I was on. And it was written on the side of it. And they told me in the safety announcements...there was no escaping the knowledge), not only is there literally upper and lower class (it's got two storeys), but in first class, they even get better seat belts. Now, I know in the case of emergency, the economy passengers usually have the better end of the deal (as a comedian whose name I've forgotten once pointed out, did you ever hear of a plane reversing into a mountain?). First class may get to lie flat in their fancy beds, they may get served champagne and are allowed to eat off chinaware, with actual cutlery (what, terrorists don't have the cash to fork out for first class?) but now they also get a better seat belt, similar to the kind found in cars. So as I struggled with my belt, which actually - and slightly alarmingly, during some awful turbulence - loosened every time I moved, breathed, curled my toes, somewhere on the plane, others were sitting secure in the knowledge that they weren't going anywhere. And they were doing it without being surrounded by teenage school children who were yet to discover the volume control for their voices. They weren't being disturbed every 5 minutes by the people next to them wanting to get up and stretch their legs, go to the loo, get a drink. They certainly weren't concerned about a 15kg bag dropping on their heads. And they probably weren't plagued by visions of how forlorn and lost their parents looked in the Melbourne gate lounge as they stepped onto a domestic flight to Sydney.

But then again, maybe they were having visions of exactly which part of the plane hits the ground first...yeah, I'm sure they were thinking that as they stretched out in their beds upstairs. They were bound to be envying the hoards crammed into the space below them.