Trust me, i've been there

He'd basically given up trying to clear and was aiming for “contain”

PARENTS SPEND A LOT OF TIME TRYING to outdo one another on what counts as “Your Total Travel Nightmare”. To be honest, whatever you’re enduring at the moment, whatever screaming, mess-making or other child-based mayhem is occurring all about you, it probably wouldn’t count as “total” because you’re probably not on a seven-hour flight. You can give me “hell on Earth” this and “projectile” that, but it doesn’t amount to a hill of beans (well, literally it probably does) on a two-hour hop to Milan.

We thought we had a bad time on the way back from Hong Kong two years ago, with one 13-month-old. He had (and, lest he sound fickle, still has) a bit of a thing for pretty young women, which normally couldn’t matter less. But then every hostess that passed him would smile and he thought they were all employed specifically to entertain him. So when they deserted their post – or, to put it another way, went off to do their jobs – he yelled. He smiled every time one approached and yelled every time she left, every five minutes for 13 hours. By the end of the flight, even other passengers were shouting: “Never mind my hot towel! Stay with the infernal child, woman, that one whose own mother isn’t pretty enough to divert him.” (Harsh, but basically fair.)

Ha, and I thought that counted as a bad flight. That would only count as a bad flight in a world where vomit didn’t exist and gravitational pull went simultaneously in all directions, so spillages just disappeared. My cousin got on a plane back to the US the other day, whereupon her son got norovirus one hour in and her daughter got it one hour later. An hour after that, the steward was taping blankets to the floor – he’d basically given up trying to clear and was aiming for “contain”. Later on he was asking for their details, with a mind to refusing them entry aboard the plane home. An hour after that, she claims they asked the entire family never to use their airline again.

If I’d told you that, I’d say don’t believe me, I exaggerate. But she tends not to. So things must have been phenomenally, atrociously bad. On balance, though, because her kids are seven and nine, it was still not as bad as it could have been, with the ages scaled down just far enough that they would accompany this whole circus with screaming.

Why am I telling you all this? To make you feel better. One degree of calamity worse always makes everyone feel better. It’s like one of those travel sickness bracelets – nobody knows why it works, but it does.