Planes enable the great escape
After Sydney’s drenching last weekend, a flight provides the perfect portal from reality.
The stairwells of Cunard’s Queen Elizabeth cruise ship are hung with black and white photographs that recall a glamorous age of travel. Think: ball gowns, dinner suits, fur coats and perfectly coiffed hair. These are passengers who not only dressed for dinner, they dressed for departure and beyond. Shoes were polished, shirts were pressed, stockings were straight. Oh, those were the days.
A brief skim through the feed of Instagram account Passenger Shaming shows how far we have come, or not, now that aeroplanes are our main mode of getting from A to B. Here we see passengers drying their socks and knickers in front of the air vents, flying shirtless, sleeping on the floor and allowing their children to create crayon art all over the window frames. There are unspeakable pictures of toilets I will never be able to unsee, and countless shots involving bare feet that make me want to wear a Hazchem suit the next time I board (which, in these pestilent times, may not be such a bad idea).
Long haul flights can be tough, especially when you’re not privileged with a perch at the pointy end of the plane. We spend hours wedged into a seat with a screen in front of us and noise-cancelling headphones blocking out our surroundings. It’s perhaps understandable we forget we’re in a public place, not our own living room.
But under the right circumstances, planes can be a sanctuary; they are our portals to other worlds, our means of escape.
As I type, I’m sitting on a flight to Tasmania. I have left behind a Sydney drenched and battered by record rainfalls. I have left behind a house with a fallen tree strewn jaggedly across its roof. I have left behind a string of buckets in an upstairs bedroom, clusters of burnt-out candles and a rapidly warming fridge.
I have left behind a sunken (how appropriate that word seems now) laundry that if left unattended for 15 minutes was filling alarmingly with water.
I have left behind two teenagers whose recent behaviour has pushed untested boundaries. And I have left behind a husband stoically wielding a mop and waving me out the door with a rueful smile.
I have escaped. Oh boy, have I escaped. My route to the airport was a wet one and my shoes got soaked, but who cares? I have my seat, my device and my headphones. Now, if I could just work out a way to get my socks dry …