How to Fly a Virgin

I have made an important travel discovery. Whenever you travel Virgin Atlantic you should try to get an economy seat on the upper deck. I did this a few days ago when I flew from London to New York and all the Gods in Creation smiled on me like I was their favourite kitten playing with a ball of string.

Half of the upper deck is first class and half is economy. Neither section is very big. Economy consists of six rows of seats in two columns of three seats each. I’d booked an aisle seat. However I gave this up to allow two little old Jewish ladies to sit together. This meant I ended up in a middle seat. At first I felt slightly hard-done-by. I had done a good and noble thing by giving up my seat to a pair of ancient and oddly dressed women who might very well have been desperately in love and forbidden by societal norms to express that love. It would have been unthinkable for them to be separated for seven hours and robbed of that innocent-on-the-outside, burning-with-passion-on-the-inside elbow sex that two consenting adults can enjoy when seated in adjoining airline seats.

In return, I was stuck with neither a window nor easy access to the toilet. The injustice did, briefly, rankle.

The rankling stopped as soon as I my seatmates joined me — two lovely women also travelling alone and desperate to be charmed by an ex-lumberjack with a keen understanding of HTML5 APIs. Bring on the elbow sex!

One was athletic and gluten-free, and the other talkative and pregnant. Athletic-and-gluten-free was having some kind of crisis on the phone when I sat down. We didn’t say anything to each other the entire flight. Unless you count the time she shrieked and buried her head in my shoulder during a stressful moment in the horror film she was watching. This happened much later in the story though. She tried to laugh it off afterwards, but it was plain to me that this behaviour hinted at a desperate need to be loved and revealed her astute appraisal of me as a strong alpha-male protector type.

I got on much better with Talkative-and-pregnant. In front of the economy section, between it and first class, there is enough space for a small choir to perform Carmina Burana. Virgin Atlantic doesn’t provide a choir for the economy passengers, so Talkative-and-pregnant and I put the space to good use by milling around up there while we waited for Althetic-and-gluten-free to perform her ablutions in the toilet. We chatted and spied on the folks in first class. There was a guy seated in first class talking to another guy who I thought looked a lot like Gary Barlow. Talkative-and-pregnant laughed when I mentioned this to her and intimated I was a crazy person.

“Gary Barlow is much better looking than that guy,” she said. “And his face is squarer and his eyes are brighter.”

“I don’t know,” I said. “His face looks pretty square to me. And the only reason his eyes don’t look as bright as you remember is because they don’t have a spotlight shining in them right now. Shout ‘Gary’ at him and then flash him with your camera and his eyes will sparkle like diamonds in a Mr. Clean commercial.”

“Whether he’s Gary Barlow or not, there is no way I’m going to flash him.”

“I meant with the flash on your camera.”

A while later, Looks-like-Gary-Barlow and his friend walked past us. For a moment I wondered where they were going. I was pretty sure they had their own toilets in first class. But then I remembered we’d passed a bar at the bottom of the stairs, an actual live sit-on-a-stool bar!

I probably would have stayed in my seat and not ventured down to check it out if Talkative-and-pregnant hadn’t picked that moment to get up and go to the toilet. But she did, so I got up as well. As I reached the bottom of the stairs, one of the hostesses asked if I would like a drink at the bar. I said, “Oh yes! Please!” and took a seat next to Looks-like-Gary-Barlow and his friend.

“What would you like?” the hostess asked.

“A whiskey, please.”

“Any preference? The Aberfeldy seems to be quite popular today,” she said, indicating a 12 year old single malt.

“That will do nicely,” I said.

She then proceeded to glug about half a pint of whiskey into my glass. I should stress that up to this point I was still unsure of whether, as an economy passenger, I was really supposed to be there. This was a pretty solid hint that I wasn’t. And, in fact, a short while later, a hostess from my section came by and casually informed me of this fact. She was very gracious about it though and said I was welcome to finish my drink before going back to my seat.

Fortunately, as I said, it was a huge drink, which meant I managed to spend about an hour at the bar chatting with the bartender hostess and Looks-like-Gary-Barlow and his friend. Looks-like-Gary-Barlow turned out not to be a pop star at all, but a banker. I forgave him this as he offered me an olive.

Later, back at my seat, myself and my seat companions all sat watching different films. Talkative-and-pregnant was watching Tron: Legacy. I was watching a rom-com. Athletic-and-gluten-free was watching a horror film. I found it difficult to concentrate on my film, so pleased was I by how the flight had turned out. I’d always wanted to sit a bar on an intercontinental flight and have a drink. And it had finally happened. And, in a way, I had almost befriended a major pop star as well! All thanks to the unspoken lust between two frustrated Jewish matrons.

Suddenly, Athletic-and-gluten-free shrieked out loud, grabbed my arm, and buried her face in my shoulder. It was at that moment I realised that I was God’s own kitten.