She'll kill me for telling you this, but my wife used to be very nervous about flying. Unlike Dennis Bergkamp, however, she was able to confront the problem. And since we first qualified for Europe (through the supermarket points scheme) some years ago, she's never yet missed an away fixture.
I'm proud of her, but I think I deserve some of the credit myself. It's nothing much. Just that I've always treated her fear with the respect and sympathy it deserved; patiently talking her through flights, and occasionally reassuring her - especially during those uncomfortable moments when the plane is making unexplained noises - by gripping her knee and saying: "Oh, my God, we're all going to die!".
Oddly enough, she doesn't believe my sense of humour had anything to do with curing her. She probably claims the breathing exercises she does before and during take-off are a bigger help. And the truth is I was never too brave about flying myself, until I discovered one of us felt worse. Then suddenly, I was fearless. It's a male thing.
Anyway, since we became parents, any nervousness about flying - per se - has disappeared. Because when you're travelling with young children, you simply have no time for aerophobia, which is quickly replaced by other, statistically far more justified fears. Like the fear that your child will throw up on the plane.
It's a well-known fact that you're safer in an aeroplane than in a car. But at least if the kid throws up in your car, you don't have an audience of 200 people looking on. So these days, whenever we're flying with our 14month-old daughter, we both do breathing exercises beforehand and hope for the best. I find the airline beer helps, too.
As I wrote last week, we were in Austria recently, where I didn't notice there was an election campaign (and a fascist revival) going on - I was too busy worrying what my daughter would do to the decor of Vienna's elegant coffee houses. The coffee houses survived unscathed, as it happened. But our luck finally ran out on the flight home.
There was little warning, as usual. We were cruising comfortably at an altitude of 30,000 feet when, suddenly, the baby announced she was experiencing severe turbulence. So we stowed the table tops away, put our seats back in the upright position, and had just located the sick bag when - yeurghh! - it was too late, and there was one, slightly-used baby breakfast all over the place.
The amazing thing is, nobody on the plane noticed. I know this because I looked around at one point and all the people near us had their heads stuck in newspapers or magazines or, in a couple of cases, oxygen masks. Not even the cabin crew, just in front of us, seemed to notice; although one attendant who had to go to the back of the plane shortly after the incident did so by climbing out of the cockpit and abseiling down the side. I'm exaggerating, but only slightly.
In fact, we were glad nobody intruded on our private grief. Mercifully, the seats were 100 per cent wipe-able; so was the floor, more or less; and, after only about 20 minutes of discreet, industrial-level cleaning, it was as if nothing had happened. Which is what everybody was pretending, anyway.
Even before the incident, it hadn't been an easy flight, child-wise; but at least after it, we could relax a little. We'd been sitting in the second row and, since there were two empty seats in front, I moved up there with the baby to give everyone more room. Soon she was fast asleep; I finally got to read the in-flight magazine, my wife finally got to read the evacuation procedures card, and the stresses of a family holiday began to fall away.
We had started our descent into Dublin, and the child was so knocked out that I just knew she wouldn't wake until we were safely off the plane; when a very apologetic air hostess came down to me and said, sorry sir, I should have told you earlier, but you can't sit in the front row with a child during landing.
Because the hostess was apologetic, I didn't say anything. I just looked at her plaintively, masking my anger apart from a facial twitch I couldn't do anything about. Then, moving very slowly, I opened the baby's seatbelt, which was attached to my seatbelt; then I opened that too, ever-so-carefully; and then I tiptoed back to our original seat. And halfway there, the baby woke up.
When something a child doesn't like happens, you always know how loud it intends to scream by the amount of oxygen it takes in first. Waking up mid-landing, our baby breathed in for what seemed a long time. She sucked in so much air the cabin underwent partial decompression, and experienced parents on the flight saw the signs and reacted subtly: sliding the volume on their headphones up to maximum, holding seat cushions to their ears, and so on.
Then finally she let go, at a pitch so high it must have affected the flight instruments. The airport's control tower probably picked it up, and decided it was from a UFO. But I had no time to worry about the noise, because by now I was convinced she was going to throw up again.
She didn't, but it was in the midst of a panicked attempt to find a towel or something to intercept the disaster that I realised the plane had actually landed, and I didn't have a seatbelt on. The cabin crew obviously hadn't noticed, or they'd have said something. Or maybe they had noticed and were afraid to come near me. I'd have been afraid too.
On the ground, we waited while everybody else got off first, some looking the other way, others giving us sympathetic smiles. All in all, it had been a traumatic flight, for us and them.
But, as we reflected back in the terminal, at least the plane landed in one piece. And my stress levels came down too, eventually. In fact, they're just arriving now at Gate 9. . .Gate 10. . .Gate 11. . *
* This joke appears courtesy of the producers of Airplane (1980), whose co-operation is gratefully acknowledged.
