I’m not a great flier. I’m not terrible, in that I go into a cold sweat as I wait to board or cry out mid-flight every time the engine sound subtly changes, but I can’t say I like it very much. I used to fly every single week, as a model - I remember one week where I did eight separate flights - but I’ve become decidedly more jumpy about it since having kids.
I know it’s the safest form of travel. I know that you have to think of turbulence as just like being on a bumpy road. I am perfectly au fait with the various failsafes and emergency protocols that airlines employ to ensure that an accident is very, very, very, very unlikely, but forgive me if hurtling through the air at 30,000 feet in what amounts to a tin can with wings doesn’t fill me with absolute confidence.
Do you know what, as well, it’s the safety briefing that freaks me out. I should just not listen to it, really, but I am both a people-pleaser and a law-abiding citizen and so when I am told to pay attention by someone wearing a tabard, lanyard or any sort of official-looking uniform then I give them my full gaze.
The shitty little life jacket! I mean honestly, what would this do in an emergency? You’re not even allowed to inflate it until you’re outside of the aeroplane, until you’re hurtling down a yellow blow-up slide into the pitch black, freezing cold Atlantic: at what stage are you really going to be able to get your shit together to find that little toggle and give it a firm tug? I’d have trouble locating it if it was directly beneath my in-seat reading light!
And then the whistle and the torch. It all feels so futile, and what it says to me is, subliminally, “if we land on water then you are absolutely f*cked.”
I’m sorry, it does.
So I am not great with flying, really, despite being incredibly well-practised, and I have to do my own little very quiet sort of meditation to get through it. I read once that all of the bad plane things happen in the first thirty seconds, and so as soon as the plane begins careering down the runway, making that hellish racket that sounds as though you’re trying to make your Dad’s 1984 Ford Cortina do sixty miles an hour in second gear (me, summer of 1998), I begin a very slow count.
Five counts breathing in, five counts holding the breath, five counts out. Thirty times. Which amounts to way more than thirty seconds, but I find comfort in that. I keep my eyes closed, I gently clasp my hands together and I imagine - don’t laugh - that the world is ending from a Zombie apocalypse/nuclear disaster and that I’m on the last plane out of Dodge.
Somehow, this mentally reinforces that being on the plane is actually the safest place for me to be. Safer than the bus that ferried me across the tarmac. Safer than the dodgy Uber driver who dropped me at the airport, who looked at his Whatsapp messages every thirty seconds even when he was doing eighty-five down the motorway. Safer than the Gatwick Express!
I have somehow managed, in this way, with my little methods, to keep my fear under control and not let my dislike of flying interfere with my work or my life. But here’s the problem: when I’m flying with the kids, all of my little methods go completely out of the window. Or not out of the window, because that doesn’t open (hopefully!) but you know what I mean. I simply cannot call upon my usual coping strategies.
My daughter, eleven, is absolutely fine - she gets travel sick, but is otherwise non-fazed by the whole process of airport, flying, landing, airport - but my son, who is nine, has an almost infinite number of questions about aeroplanes, pilots, and flying as soon as we begin queueing up in the line for boarding.
And it would be OK if these questions were about, I don’t know, where they store all of the sandwiches, or what happens if you want to take your dog on a plane, or whether they sometimes get all of the suitcases mixed up and send them to the wrong country. I could cope with that, but his questions are both complex and morbid, tending to focus on aeronautical engineering failures and potential fatal mid-air disasters:
