I went on an airplane recently (I have to travel a lot with my work and believe me, sometimes I think the weight of my guilty conscience is going to pull the plane out of the sky but I offset my carbon footprint by buying a bag for life every time I’m in the supermarket). On the plane I sat in economy class (because I don’t think I’m better than anyone else despite making my own houmous with free range chickpeas and that one time I bought the Big Issue and actually read some of it before throwing it back in the vagabond’s face, I mean throwing it away, I mean recycling it by turning it into an origami statue of Princess Diana) although I was invited into the cockpit to meet the pilot and do a sudoku (fiendish) and talk about how fulfilling secular humanism can be before take-off.
Instead I sat in my seat dangerously close to my fellow, just-as-good-me plebeian passengers and I completed a cryptic crossword with my eyes shut and wrote an operetta in German which is going to be performed to raise money to build a yoga centre for disadvantaged badgers.
Then the food arrived. And when I say arrived, I mean it was delivered to me by someone who almost certainly doesn’t understand the basic physics that allow a plane to stay aloft but was more than capable of carrying a tray. Then I ate the food and the food I ate was really good. Honestly, I don’t know what else to tell you. It was amazing - gourmet - haute cuisine - literally! Get it? Because haute means high in french and I was on a plane about 30,000 feet in the air, so that’s quite high.
(I speak fluent French, I’m still in touch with my penpal from Perpignan, and I insist on writing letters by hand and receiving only handwritten letters even though my penpal has cerebral palsy and has trouble holding a pen but come on, what’s more important? Some traditions are worth fighting for!)
Back to the food (before it gets cold!): it was so good and tasty and delicious I’d go so far as to say it was better than a lot of meals I've had on the ground, terra firma (I speak fluent Latin too, but who doesn’t?) And I’ve had a lot of meals on the ground. I’m so civilised I’ve eaten at least once every day since I was born and I born over 11,000 days ago. So you get the picture, the food was so impressive that I was positively ..well…impressed. Imagine that! Impressed by someone other than myself! At one point I even managed to stop eating the most excellent food to ask the stewardess if the chef was available for private hire.
“If I ever get married,” I said, “there’s going to be food there because weddings are depressing - largely because marriage is an outdated patriarchal institution perpetuating the subjugation of women and the myth of everlasting romantic love, I read that once in the Guardian and now I think that’s what I think - and people like to eat when they’re depressed. And I want the chef to do the catering at my wedding. In fact if the chef is a woman and she's not yet married then I would like to marry her. Not in a church, but in a remote tribal hut naked caked in mud. And she can do the food so we can save some money on the wedding and put it towards something more useful like sponsoring a homeless asteroid or starting a fund for those poor unfortunate boys who went to Eton and still didn’t manage to get into the Cabinet.”
“The chef is a man,” said the stewardess, “he is single as far as I know and I do believe he’s gay.”
“That doesn’t surprise me in the slightest,” I replied with a gay glint in my eye, “I’m not a gay myself but I am extremely liberal and I’m keen to have a homosexual love affair just so I can write a book about the experience and then have the book turned into a film that goes on to win the Palme D’Or (Golden Palm) at Cannes (Cannes).”
