"Have a nice flight" intoned the orange-clad member of staff at the boarding gate. She'd said it a few times now and showed no sign of variation as the dejected queue of passengers shuffled past her.
I wondered if sometimes the urge to say "I shouldn't tell you this, but... you're all going to die" or "The pilot's wife left him today, you know" to one unfortunate passenger as she slipped the boarding card through The-Machine-That-Does-Stuff-To-Boarding-Cards sometimes overwhelms her before she resumes the "Have A Nice Flight" mantra.
Luckily, I wasn't today's victim as I made my way past her orangey countenance. I wanted to say "Have a nice flight? I'm about about to be strapped into a nasty seat, in a nasty aluminium tube of a plane and blasted back to London Gatwick at 500mph. This does not constitute 'nice' in any language I know of"
Of course, I didn't say that. What I actually said was "Thank you" with a plastic grin with which the woman would have been all too familiar before boarding my plane and indulging in the ritual fight for a seat.
I gazed at my fellow passengers. Nobody was making eye-contact. We all knew what we were - too cheap to fly with a proper airline, but nobody was about to admit it.
Time, I think, for a beer.
