Air travel

When my black passport arrived in the post, I decided to take a trip. I’m not a good flier, so the absence of foreign travel for three years had to be making my fear of flying potentially insurmountable. A one and a half hour flight to Cork felt manageable. The builder boyfriend had already been over to have a look at this farm we’ve had our eye on. Incidentally, I know this passport is meant to be dark blue, but it’s not, it’s black. And to make it more alarming, the picture of me inside it is bright orange. I had slapped cheap make-up on my face and was wearing

On the BOAC VC10 flights to Nairobi, the pilots would invite children like me up to sit in the cockpit with them. Once they put me behind the controls and I was very nervous about making a wrong move that could throw us into a tailspin. I had a BOAC badge and a Junior Jet Club book, which the captain kindly signed for me on each voyage. Attractive stewardesses served breakfast, lunch and supper with metal cutlery, the seats were huge with loads of legroom for tall men and the adults puffed away on cigarettes. The cabin was ultra-quiet because the four big Rolls-Royce engines were in the tail, rather

Gstaad Chekhovian boredom ruled supreme, but the loss of my luggage brought instant relief. Anger beats boredom by a mile, especially when mixed with paranoia about a plot against the rich. Let me explain: On Monday 21 December, I left the Bagel, destination Switzerland, checking in at the first-class counter of Suisse, as the national airline of Helvetia is now called. I was informed by the friendly Afro-Caribbean lady who checked me in that I would be travelling alone up front. Delighted by the news, I assumed that was the reason she attached no luggage stubs to my boarding pass. She had made me wait for quite a while for

There was only a handful of us arriving at Bristol on flight 6114 from Nice. Oscar and I had the leisure to choose which of the four available UK Border Force officers we most liked the look of. None of them were your usual bruisers. One was a careworn, perhaps broken old man and during the brief wait in the taped corridor we speculated on the nature of the tragedy that had brought him here to this. My speculative theory was that he had impulsively married an unpresentable woman, who had turned out to be an incurable alcoholic who beat him. Oscar’s was that he had been discharged from prison

‘There’s no need to wipe down your tray table,’ screeched Heidi, chief steward of the ‘amazing team you have looking after you today’. ‘Because for your safety today,’ she went on, ‘the aircraft is deep-cleaned between flights by specialists.’ Which brought to mind the chain gang of depressed women that one sometimes sees filing aboard during a stopover to gather rubbish and flick a duster around. I wondered whether they had been inspired or lashed into devoting their lowly paid attention and energies to the tray-table catch, for instance, or to the overhead ventilation nozzle or to the locker handles. Just as, earlier, I had also wondered how many hundreds

When I worked in the Malaysian capital of Kuala Lumpur long ago, my office looked across Jalan Tun Razak, a boulevard named in honour of the country’s second prime minister and ‘father of development’. This week his son Najib Razak, its sixth prime minister (2009-2018), was convicted of charges relating to the disappearance of $4.5 billion from a sovereign wealth fund called 1MDB which he once controlled. More trials await, but 1MDB may go down not only as the world’s biggest corruption scandal but also the most vulgar — proceeds that might have helped Malaysia’s poor having been frittered on private jets, penthouses, parties in Las Vegas and the financing