Long haul flights

These musings occur to me on a flight from Tokyo to Vienna - both excellent places but the parts in between, certainly on the current flight path, seem to me to be a little barren.

First, I am convinced that one of the two outer seats in the bank of four is the best to aim for. There is always a chance that the passenger next to you will choose to clamber out on the other side if you are asleep. The other two passengers are almost bound to do so.

Airline food is almost always disgusting: Victoria Wood once summed it up well when she described the passenger next to her who ate everything: "He ate the salt and pepper. He ate the little towelette thing for wiping your hands on. He even ate the thing I thought they only put there for a joke, you know the tinned pear and the dream topping." When comedians make you realise how we've always thought something but never dared to say it out loud.

The meal just served by Austrian Airlines fell, I am afraid, into the disgusting category. There was a choice between "Asian Chicken" and "Western Pork". I plumped for the chicken, on the grounds that we were in Asia and the food was likely to have been made there by people more experienced in putting together Asian food than Western food. The chicken had been so finely minced that it was indistinguishable from the insipid sauce surrounding it. Remind me, on another occasion, to write an entry on the western style sliced bread they give you in India.

The only exceptions to the rule about poor food are, in my view, when snacks are purveyed. Air France provided a perfectly good baguette filled with Mountain Ham on a flight from Paris to London once. Fortunately there was no time to heat up any food. A different kind of ham but none the worse for it was given to me by the staff on a USAir internal flight. I recall a particular awkwardness: I wanted a tomato juice to go with it. How, though, should I say tomato?

Strawberry milkshake

Packets of Tunnocks Caramel Wafers; tins of Condensed Milk; and bottles of Strawberry Crush. These were things that my parents used to buy at Sainsbury's when we were all younger - but they were not, as might be expected, intended for my brother and I. They were for my father. My brother and I would, naturally, help ourselves to the odd caramel wafer. And, on occasion, the odd milkshake.

My father once found me in the kitchen mixing Strawberry Crush and milk and immediately took over at the brown work surface. Tipping double cream into a blender, adding the mixture I had prepared earlier, he skilfully blended all the ingredients together, giving a running commentary: "Now, I whipped the cream before adding it". Finally, he presented the result to me in a tall glass. "I think you'll find that's pretty special."

Many years later, I was thousands of miles away, in Madras as it was then called. A short walk along the Poonemallee High Road from the school where I was teaching and living, was a restaurant called the Gouri Shankar. Sometimes, instead of food cooked by the Ayah, we would each receive a plate of noodles or fried rice brought in from the restaurant. My high ideals - before arriving in India, I wouldn't have contemplated the notion of being served with special, costly food at the school's expense - were abandoned. The noodles, in particular, were delicious. Shona and Tory were the other volunteers. Towards the end of our time at the school, possibly a little impatient with the restrictions, we would sometimes venture out in the evening and head to the Gouri Shankar. It wasn't quite the pub that Tory longed for but it was atmospherically dark, chillingly air-conditioned and the noodles, as I say, were delectable. Plus they did rather good strawberry milkshakes. I had one on my nineteenth birthday. Not quite as good as the one my father made.