March 17th Leaving the UK
So, the start of my journey….
Having left to get to Heathrow with plenty of time for the suggested 3
hour prior to arrival check-in, we traveled almost the whole journey in
gridlock on the M25. It turned out that the suggested 3 hours was overly
cautious though and I caught my plane in plenty of time. Unfortunately
the plane was completely full so there was no possibility to try and blag
an upgrade. It was a mahusive plane with two floors. I was sat in the
middle of a sweet little Old Eastern lady and a youngish boy with his
extended family to my right. Prior to take off I spent a couple of minues
wondering what the pouch under the old lady’s top was. I considered the
fact that she may be a suicide bomber and then tried to reassure myself
that she was a lovely old lady. This didn’t help as I then realised that
she was traveling alone (yes much like myself, but I don’t have -quite-
such a large paunch). Needless to say the lump turned out to be a bum bag
and she was lovely and helped me with my various gubbins when I had to
clambour over her to go to the toilet.
The plane itself was nice with decent meals, free drinks and snacks. Each
seat had a screen with various films, music, games etc. I was greatly
amused by this when the boy to my right made numerous attempts to watch
completely unsuitable films for his age. His mother, needless to say, was
somehat less amused. when he fell asleep I took the opportunity to watch
‘No room for old men’. Unfortunately he woke up half way through and
seemed enthralled by the various shootings, blood and gore. His mother
looked on disparigingly but I was relatively into the film at this stage
so did not really want to stop it. She took it upon herself to put a film
on for her son which, to me, seeemd to basically amount to soft porn with
a quasi-feminist message. She seemed to delight in the ’empowerment’ the
women gained in doing seedy dancing for men, seducing them and then going
on to preverbially ‘do them over’. This seemed to divert the boys’ eyes
from my film. So I guess that the message here is that soft ‘pro-woman’
porn is a gopd thing for young boys to watch, whereas dark violence is
not.
The rest of the flight passed without incident and I arrived in Hong Kong.