December 13, 2011

by Mike Reali in London, England

It’s almost four years since I’ve flown overseas. At least two years too long. I’m sitting in Seat 32C on British Airways Flight 66. It’s a Boeing 777, large enough to have two aisles, but at least a third of the seats are empty. An English fellow keeps trading seats with people in order that he might make his kids more comfortable somehow.

For dinner there was lasagna, salad, and banana cake. I must confess I quite enjoy airplane food. It’s efficiency never fails to impress me; all these perfect little meals being produced seemingly out of a cart not much larger than R2-D2. They don’t taste half bad either. I’ll take airline food over hospital food any day.

Looking around this plane bound for London it’s hard to imagine that the end of this journey lies South, past the Sahara, in a place whose name is synonymous with “the middle of nowhere”. Timbuktu.