Le Grand Air-Miles A$$hole

I've never tried it, but people say that you can get your revenge on the pillock who races up and down the street at 70mph at midnight in his souped-up Citroen 205 by blogging his activities and putting his car reg in as a tag so that other people can find it via Google and heap contumely upon him (and then find themselves up before the European Court of Inverted Human Rights, probably.)


I wish I could do the same for the occupant of seat 13C on Swiss flight LX394 out of Zurich at 12:10pm today, 27 November 2010.


I hate flying, but I love flying Swiss because the the flight attendants are always so gentle and soothing, and I feel as though this is what Heaven must be like, and they give me confidence because I know that they don't want to get there prematurely any more than I do or the pilot does. Why, once we had a lady driver, and the male co-pilot was careful not to tell us until after the (perfect) landing.


Passengers pile in. Settle themselves.  The usual sort of fatalistic fingers-crossed calm descends as the driver revs up and things start roaring and rattling.


Then rises imperiously from his seat Mr Frequent Traveller Air Miles A££hole and addresses very pleasant young Swiss flight attendant who is closing the baggage lockers. "Bloody hell, I'm on a Fokker. You there, girl, go and ask the Captain how old it is.  30 at least.  Amazed it's still flying. "  (this is during taxiing. Passengers glance anxiously at each other. Some cross themselves, this being Switzerland.)


While flight attendants mime their safety instructions to the Tannoy, A$$hole switches on mobile device, plugs in earphones and becomes deaf to the not only the world, but the word. He does eventually switch off his Important Person Blackberry, but only at the last possible nanosecond, and passengers are now frantically writing their last wills and testaments.


Flight attendants doing last-minute checks before take-off.  A$$hole intercepts one.  "Don't you have today's FT on this flight, dear?"


Passengers and flight attendants are now so cowed by this Important Person (travelling Economy, note) that he also manages to get himself fed and coffee'd twice, once on the up-round and then again on the down-round, while the rest of us were starving.


13D and E having long since fled to vacant seats (about 3 and 5 seconds respectively after encountering him, actually)  we were the only people in range.  Stuffing himself with his second snack he impertinently inquired: 'Been on holiday, then?'


We both turned away and muttered to each other in French (we had been able to brush up our colloquial French at the Piaf concert that Fabienne Jost had given the night before in the Stadttheater Bern.)


Swiss must know who he is - he is frequent-flier Mr Air Miles A$$hole.  Dear Swiss, can't you ban him?  He undoes everything you do to put your passengers at ease.  Can't you put him on something wooden with one dodgy prop and an outside lavvy next time he books with you, tell him he's going first-class, then open the scuppers and drop him in the sea about 100 miles off Reykjavik?


It was only after we'd landed at Manchester that my dear wife pointed out  that we'd been on row 13.  With him.  Mr Total Tosser Know-it-All Air Miles A$$hole.

M'sieur - how interesting it was to cross your path. As we say in English: Vous etes, m'sieur,  vainqueur complet.  And I can't even be bothered to flatter you with the necessary diacritics.

Just 450 words

Bernard Levin did it, TS Eliot did it a lot in Finnegan’s Wake, and no doubt there are other writers who have written an entire column or even book in a  single sentence, but I shouldn’t think it’s easy -  you have to have at your disposal an armoury of weapons such as parentheses (like these,  within which you can waffle on about anything you fancy); or subordinate clauses, which have nothing whatsoever to do with Santa and Christmas but are rather a way of breaking sentences up into related or opposed sense-groups; or very long lists, catalogues, inventories and enumerations of things or words, such as the massive pile-ups of adjectives that Levin used to build pace and tension (and I do miss Bernard’s lively animadversions on anything or everything that got under his skin, though you have to read his books now because he passed on in 2004); and there are others, all helping to constitute what is generally though indefinably called ‘style’, as though style was something that could be pinned down like a butterfly and taken apart to see how it worked, which of course it can’t be because in the process something gets killed, and what gets killed is something so intrinsic to the form and substance that the exercise is pointless, although I have to say that many literary critics (such as F R Leavis or I A Richards) took no notice and carried on regardless, adding little to the literary canon but paving the way for these dreadful postmodernists, most of ’em French (and we all know how French people enjoy a bit of philosophising over a carafe of  rouge and one of those long loaves that can do you such a nasty injury if it pokes you in the eye, though even the baguette is nothing like as hazardous as the croissant, which must be the messiest item of food every invented, scattering as it does more than its own body-weight in crumbs all over your tablecloth, lap, floor, carpet, and dog) and pretty well incomprehensible to people with only one brain; people like Foucault and Derrida, and one or two non-French people like Skinner and Chomsky, all of whom I blame for the fact that all Eng Lit classes teach nowadays is how to find the sub-text so as to work out what Charles Dickens had for his breakfast on Fridays in 1860 or whether Emily Bronte ever had a boy-friend, and if you think postmodernists are a waste of space as far as Eng Lit is concerned just see what they’ve done to music, which is all repetitive plink and plonk nowadays – and so I’m not even going to try.