Aidan Hartley Aidan Hartley

Wild Life | 21 February 2009

Flying high

issue 21 February 2009

36,000 feet

When I was a teenager on a flight to Nairobi I sat next to a pretty Kenyan girl the same age as me. We got talking. Out of the blue at 36,000 feet she slipped me a scrap of paper on which was scrawled, ‘I LOVE YOU.’ ‘That’s nice,’ I said. I did nothing about it. On another flight back to school in England we got delayed in Zurich, where an attractive older female passenger bummed a cigarette off me. When we reached London she took me back to her posh London flat. ‘Aha,’ I thought. She quite literally showed me her engravings, things got steamy and yet at the crucial moment I bailed. Today I naturally regret turning down such opportunities for casual sex.

As an adult I found myself taking an altogether different sort of flight.

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