WHEN WE travel, we work our bodies at high speed then change to absolute inertia with no notice in between. It's a nausea-inducing cocktail of standing and running, waiting and queueing, sprinting to gates and sitting, then running to form a line, getting past the gate and queueing to board, then frantically finding overhead bins and stuffing luggage into them while everyone else is waiting, then sitting down and waiting to use the toilet, while everyone else stuffs luggage into overhead bins.
When we queue for the toilet we're asked to rush back to our seats for take-off, then "this is your captain speaking and relax - we're queueing for the runway". We're nearly falling asleep in our seats when we're shot through the air. Then we cannot rest as we circle our home town queueing to land. Then we land too fast, taxi too slow, squirm in agony waiting for the doors to open. Then we sprint to the taxi queue, stand in the line, finally reach the top and ask our driver to step on it. Why do we make travel so unpleasant? Why can't we train ourselves not to fight for every inch, minute and air mile?
At the gate for a Ryanair flight back to Dublin recently, I was part of a scene involving people of six different nationalities, a scene in which each of us behaved in a way that was perfectly emblematic of our country's national character, and all of which was bad for everyone's health.
I was the first person to clear airport security because I needed to be somewhere in Dublin that night, and I reasoned that if I got onto the plane first, I could sit in seat 1A and once the plane landed I could bolt for the taxi. The gate was in a glass-walled room, through the middle of which ran a partition of those elasticated belts that click into each other (with which I cannot help myself from interfering when I am in any line). At the front of this partition was a sign indicating that the left hand side was for those who had paid for priority boarding, and for the rest to go to the right. Around the perimeter of the room were seats.
I had paid for priority boarding and I was first in the room, but there was no way I was going to be the guy who stands at the counter when the plane hasn't yet landed - a one-man army of tension. I took a seat on the left. Immediately, a short Italian man in his sixties walked up to the desk on my side, the priority side, put his suitcase on the ground right in front of it, then walked around and took a seat on the non-priority side. Clearly, he didn't want to be the guy who stands at the counter when the plane hasn't even landed either. But nor did he want to lose out - hence the suitcase which, standing alone in the middle of the room, could only have seemed more like a bomb if it had a sparkling fuse shortening on top.
Within a few minutes, a Scottish couple in their fifties (hill-walkers, I'm certain) entered, saw the bag and walked around it and stood in front of it facing the desk, as if they weren't speaking to the suitcase anymore. I watched the short Italian man take this in, then jump to his feet because the Irish had arrived and we were ready to form our national queue - that circular confluence of bodies brushing off each other, nudging forward behind each other's backs, spilling around the sides to gain tiny advantages.
Being Irish myself, I had to finagle my way into the centre of the organism. As soon as I stood up, a Russian family sat down where I had been, and seemed happy to watch the rest of us standing when the plane hadn't yet landed. Being Russian, they realised the utter futility of hope - for them a seat is more than they could have hoped for.
Five Italian ticket collectors materialised at the desk, causing our queueing organism to envelop it with anticipation. The ticket collectors were oblivious to our beating pulse and the musk of tension which clung to our T-shirts. They might have come from a languorous picnic in the car-park, and were continuing a heated conversation that might have been about murder. Fingers were drawn across throats, hands made violent chopping motions, and through the window we saw the plane screeching onto the tarmac and taxiing around to our gate. Outside, the arrivals spilled onto the tarmac and were herded into a shuttle bus. The Scottish hillwalkers could now see through the steel hull of the plane into the cabin, and could read the mind of the captain. They tried to tell the Italian ticket collectors it was okay to start collecting tickets, but it wasn't until the frazzled Polish stewardess ran across the tarmac and began to beat at the glass window with her fists that they paused their animated conversation.
We were already late, and the Polish stewardess wanted to get home to Dublin. The queue pressed forward onto the desk, and as a hand reached out for the first priority boarding card, the Italian man with the suitcase was neck-and-neck with the Scottish hillwalkers. Out of nowhere a party of six people from . . . north-east Europe, slid into the top of the queue, using their handsome children as protective armour. Recriminations, filthy looks and red-faced muttering abounded, the queue squeezed ever tighter, and I am ashamed to report that there was sprinting on the tarmac and wanton overtaking of women and infants.
Most of all, there was gleeful schadenfreude on board, when the north-eastern European family found that they could not fit their luggage in the overhead bin and it was removed for stowage in the hold. As the tin can climbed into the sky, how we laughed; me and the Italian man, the Scottish hillwalkers, and the Polish stewardess. How we were winning.
John Butler blogs at http://lozenge.wordpress.com