Even when flatbedding I find it very hard to sleep on long haul flights. My strategies for passing the time are usually well planned and expansive. There was no chance of me drifting off in my coach seat during today's flight to JFK.
When bored, shopping is usually a good first avenue. Just after take off I flicked through the American Airlines inflight shopping brochure - marvelling at the decidedly pedestrian brands. The catalogue makes my new repertoire tv show Pan Am look even more fantastical, glamorous and extinct. AA know their customer and pitch their offering in the same league as the Elizabeth Duke jewellery line from Argos. Their target customer is apparently Darlene from Delaware and she has a bad perm, fanny pack and the name of her fly-over state college printed on her sweatshirt, over which she let's her gold neck chain hang. Even the Aer Lingus inflight temptations are more seductive, with the possible exception of Inis the perfume from Connemara that markets itself as smelling like wild gorse from the Twelve Bens Mountains. I bet Ireland's new first lady wears Inis.
Not yet out of UK airspace and I switch to the American Airlines inflight magazine. Its cover feature is a pr-driven fluff piece about Manchester which any one of my friends from when I was fifteen could have written back in 1989 - apart from having the foresight that the drummer from the Inspiral Carpets would go on to give rock heritage walking tours around his native city once his star's wattage diminished. I would have pegged him as an advertising copywriter or a car mechanic. I also managed to finish the magazine's 'fiendishly difficult' level soduko puzzle whilst failing to complete the mislabelled 'moderate' one.
Moving on to a misspent autistic 10 minutes scraping the mushroom and spinach filling out of my vegetarian lasagne and finally eating the pasta sheets solo avoiding the ricotta-style sauce. This is washed back with a tin of Minute Maid. The world would be no different if Minute Maid tinned orange concentrate never existed. Nor could I imagine anyone being arsed to start an organic Wispa-style resurrection campaign on Facebook if it was shelved from stores.
I manage to do five crossword puzzles from the latest issue of Puzzler Pocket Crosswords, issue 325, before tiring of it. This proves a good return on investment with 75 minutes amusement for £1.40. Sample clue 21 across; young hogs (7 letters) P-R-E-S. Am regretting not up-buying the pack of Haribo gummy bears Saj tried to sell me at the till of WHSmith in T3.
Bored and in need of a sugar rush I manage one game of solitaire on my iPad, finished in 8 minutes 53 seconds, scoring 19,537 points, 2,000 short of a raking in my top 15 table. Am not feeling competitive so switch to Plants v Zombies. The adrenaline from battling the zombies is taking me out of my red wine induced quasi stupor so I abort and spend about 40 long minutes trying to sleep upright with my c-shaped economy class pillow of shame wrapped around my neck. The last time I successfully managed to fall asleep in a seated position was in a double class of science in my third year of secondary school.
Spend several minutes deciphering that the passenger next to me is listening to the Sgt Peppers album. She is an 60 year old Upper West-sider returning from Tel Aviv, who earlier spent 30 minutes telling me about her recent history and that there is a great deli near my hotel worth visiting. My Nora Ephron intuition correctly nipped that story in the bud and signalled to her that we have radically different taste in restaurants.
After flicking through the personalised inflight movie guide I decide against Bad Teacher, Zookeeper, Captain America or Midnight in Paris - having recently torrented the latter to much amusement and delight that Woody has finally made a good European film. I wonder why inflight entertainment curators put random episodes of Downton Abbey or Harry's Law on their schedules. They should stick to stand-alonable shows that resolve themselves within the title sequences, like The Price is Right or The Red Shoe Diaries.
Try to read the book I started yesterday, BooHoo, the spectacular tale of the demise of Boo.com an early, glamorous casualty of the first dot.com crash. I bet Kajsa and Ernst never had to forcibly entertain themselves when flying Concord transatlantic on their overzealous investors' dime. Its a wonderful tale of how to blow $130m in 12 months on vintage Krug, Concord and BMP/DDB retainers. Manage to get two paragraphs in and get restless.
As I pass Godthab in Greenland I thumb a copy of Q magazine which I only purchased for the Achtung Baby covers album. Can't wait to give it a whizz and hear Depeche Mode cover So Cruel, Jack White do Love Is Blindness and Patti Smith's Until The End Of The World. Annoyingly I read a feature about Kasabian launching Velociraptor, their new album, with a gig on a 747 mid-flight. I didn't imagine it possible that I could dislike the band more, and nor could I imagine a more unpleasant flight. I'd gladly do 7 hour 55 minute flight rather than endure a 45 minute flight with Kasabian and their fans. For my most hated band, I'm unable to name any of their songs. I think it's the guitarist with the hairsprayed doo that rubs me the wrong way. Footage from the gig is available on vevo.com, which I predict will go to dot.com heaven soon alongside Boo.
Finally pizza is served with some Canada Dry and it's time to land, in minus 4 degrees and snowcover.
