Flight of Terror

I once flew to Rumania (or Romania, take your pick) on board a plane from their national airline. This was in the days before they kicked their then dictator, Nicoleae Ceaucescu, to death and before they joined the new nazi dictatorship of the european union. You would have thought they’d have know better, but no. Commie airlines, I think they were called.

 

Well, the hostesses all looked like the werewolf from Carry on Screaming, but hairier – I kid you not. Either that or they were cross-dressing all in wrestlers with two and a half pounds of foundation, rouge and lipstick plastered over their angular faces to disguise their five o’clock shadow. The in flight meal was clearly polystyrene painted to look like food and they grudgingly flung it at us anyway as though we were stealing it from the mouths of their starving children.

 

There was no sign of any other in flight service, apart from repeated attempts to flog us cartons of Marlborough cigarettes and bottles of perfume. Having, in hungry desperation, eaten the bread roll that accompanied the pretend food, which was so dry it almost choked me, I had little choice but to drink the tasteless gnat’s piss that passed for my free cup of tea and any request for water or other soft drink was greeted by an unfriendly scowl and apparent incomprehension. I didn’t like to press the point, either, in case one of the giant man-women got me in a full nelson and body slammed me onto the gangway floor.

 

The seats had obviously come from a medieval torture chamber and the pilot was a real loony, bringing us into land with a kamikaze style screaming dive that almost exploded my head – the sudden reduction in cabin pressure bringing me, sweating and groaning, to the edge of unconsciousness and leaving me almost stone deaf for half of my holiday so every conversation sounded like it was coming to me while submerged in a swimming pool, with pains in my ears that felt as if some torturing bastard was jamming meat skewers into my eardrums.

 

You just can’t pay for service like that.

 

Course you holiday camps can’t. Don’t talk prison blocks.