Excuse the weird editing in the last post; the Dubai hotspot cunningly posted it while seeming not to thus providing some Pashtun gobbledegook.
To round off My Travels In Africa and Dubai, my seat on the last leg home was in the last row of the plane. This is probably good if the front of the plane is sheared off in the freak accident that will inevitably happen to me one day, but not good if you don't want to spend 8 hours or so listening to the endless conversation of the cabin crew whose congregation area is behind the last row. Cabin crew, I learn, rarely know each other. This means eight hours of small talk that only improves to slightly bigger talk and by the end of the eight hours goes back to the smaller kind of talk. The small talk consists mostly of these subjects:
- what hotel they're staying in
- whether they're going to Manchester this week
- whether they should bother going into central London
- how much easier night flights are “because they're asleep” [with "they" being less than a metre away and not deaf]
- how with experience they start to forget things like which flight they've just come in on
- how much shopping they're going to do
- how much shopping they're going to do
- how much shopping they're going to do
I am certain, sort of, that I'm not the only nervous flyer who relies, daftly, on the facial expressions of cabin crew to offer some reassurance. Weird noise; look at cabin crew. Loud thumping; look at cabin crew. If cabin crew look worried, start to properly panic. But after my eight hours of involuntary in-depth investigation into the psyche of the people who are supposed to hold my life and death in their hands, I think I may as well look at the wheel nuts. At least they don't live for shopping.