Personal column
Arianna Stassinopoulos
New York I am going to set up a Society for the Rehabilitation of Airplanes. For most people they are a bore — a long empty interval between departing and arriving. A sort of sticky and cramped version of the intermission which intrudes in an epic — and the effect of a long 'plane journey is to make even the most humdrum life on the ground seem an epic. Apart frdm those few eccentrics who find in flying either sheer ecstasy or sheer terror, for most people it is a long stretch of traumatic boredom to be desperately kept at bay by non-stop drinking. Even the first-class favoured few think of the trip as something best forgotten — curled up in their flying womb, they sleep securely held in place by an umbilical safety-belt. That prototype Atlantic commuter, David Frost, treats the first-class cabin as an extension of his bedroom. Two tablets on take-off transform his window seat into a jet-prop Put-U-Up and six or eleven beautysleep hours later, he emerges in New York or Los Angeles fresh as a daisy — reared under glass.
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