Alien Lanes

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I’ve had frightening dreams about planes for decades but the one I had twelve days ago, on the eve of my first flight in 23 years, was a little different. It wasn’t at all like the recurring nightmare I had for many years about the return flight I took from New York in 1996, where the plane I was on forgot to track the curve of the earth and continued to go gradually up, until it entered outer-space - a nightmare I first had on the flight itself, somewhere four hundred miles west of Ireland - and it wasn’t like the dream I have sometimes had about being on a malfunctioning plane somewhere in the middle of Russia which is smashing into an unbroken, everlasting line of telegraph poles as it desperately strives to stay above a landscape so vividly stark and icy that it is always slightly astonishing to me, when I wake up, to remember that, outside of this dream, I have never visited it. Instead, this time I dreamt about a surreal, slow-mo, landhugging version of the route the Easyjet flight my partner Ellie and I had booked ourselves on would soon take from Bristol, in South West England, to Bordeaux, in South West France. The plane skilfully slithered and banked around office buildings and ferries and chateaus and longéres, never once quite brushing its tail or wings against them, and, although I probably should have, I did not feel scared, and was glad to be able to see the changes in architecture and landscape in close detail. “We’ll be getting into the sky in just a few moments,” the pilot kept saying, but then, after ninety minutes or so, we had miraculously reached our destination, without getting within 1000 feet of a cloud. “I actually decided to stay low all the way,” he told us, as the cabin crew unlocked the exits. “It seemed a more pleasant way to do things.”

What, aside from the basic fact that I’ve been shit scared of it for almost three decades, does this say about me and flying? Probably that my main problem is that I quite simply don’t believe in it: I don’t believe in the insane height that an aircraft soars to, don’t believe that it’s natural or correct or necessary. And that, partly, is why, until last week, I hadn’t done it for so long. But there are other reasons, too. The main one undoubtedly being that in early summer 1997, somewhere a little north of Brittany, I was on a plane that was struck, quite dramatically, by lightning.