…..continued ….__.

Dispite our protests to the French air women who suprisingly did not surrender at the sight of a German and an English man we had lost and had to eat the fish. This was also after some witty remark about “you can trust a French women” which was responded to by “I thought they were all lies” or something, by Simba.

So there we sat still hungry, watching terrible TV and old movies on a broken down little LCD smaller than my phone and probably older than time itself. Possibly even the first LCD ever fucking invented for all I know and do not care. Serveral long and uncomfortable hours past and I started to notice a lot of French people travelling to the back of the plane and returning with handfulls of  Häagen-Daz icecream. So I said to Simba I will get us some icecream and walked the 15 or so rows to the back of the plane where I asked the stewardess who on handing sixs tubs over to a French person said there was none left and said “there is granola and water” I said something like “hmmm nice” and “great stuff” and before I lost my temper collected two of each before the French got them as well and went back to Simba.

Can you believe it? If you want to do an experiment in human response and digestion why not stick 300 hundred people in a plane - which is a sealed aluminium tube, if you were not aware, stick it into the sky and then cook and feed a high proportion of them near the back stinky fish and high fibre food products! Why do we need terrorists? I am surprised that A) I did not rupture some internal bowel due to the gas my stomach created, B) explode the plane and C) that we all walked away alive with only minor radiation and brain damage from the cosmic rays and the bodily gases.

We did make it to San Fransico tired and hungry so I can rate the trip thus. It was successful in that Air France did managed to fly to the correct destination without loosing my luggage and or crashing the plane and killing us all to deathness. Other than that they did not really get anything right for me.

Remember this is still all BA’s fault for striking.

I am a pleb, a cheapscate my Yorkshire blood runs deep so I have not flown in the rich class at the front (actually I have but that is complicated and will be explained later, now next blog of this series) nor have I travelled in the less poor class in the middle. I have as KLM like to point out on BIG lettered boarding inside the plane flown in “ECONOMY CLASS”. Is this in case you get lost whilst walking down from the gym to the jacuzzi at the front of the plane or something and can not understand why there are so many seats so close together with some very peculiar smells? And I’ve never pushed the boat out to “Economy comfort” class - which makes me really nervous as what is the opposite of economy comfort? Economy pain for the sadomasochistic traveller?

So there is the poor, the less poor, the sadomasochists and the rich bastard classes along with the super, uber rich bastards. I am seldom to be found anywhere but Economy. This too is true of my trains rides which are always poor class, my flights, my everything, except food. But I digress. Actually I must. How come when I travel Virgin RAIL (not plane) first class there is never any food, nor staff nor free coffee nor anything. This is normally because of the boiler being broken or “we are sorry that we left a staff member at Stafford, so there will be no buffet service today” - “you may get a coffee and a sandwich from the shop in carriage F you are in carriage A, will people please move down the entire carriages as the service is very busy today and there is no room to pass in the door ways”. But my fiancee who travels first class a lot (update so much so she now has a special card - I don’t know but I am going to steal it and find out what it does) always gets coffee and alcohol and food and chooses not to have any as she is working or being travel sick from working.

Ok so KLM. I had to wait until the return trip back to the UK before I could start to finish this blog. It turned from a rant about Air France to a comparison of KLM and Air France and then just a general note about the entire state of the world which to make sure you are clear is crap from my perspective in the cheap seats.

So the KLM flight, after the airport issues in San Fran was a pleasant surprise. The passenger boarding was a bit mental but it always is. We are so desperate to rush on to the plane so that we can make sure we can fit our oversized cases into the undersized over head lockers and secretly laugh at the people who arrive later and can not. But we forget that we are then stuck in the little aluminium tube for the next half day breathing everyone else’s farts, breath and erm skin. If the women calls zone 2 then why are people in zone 5 queuing or more annoyingly for me when zone 3 was called just standing near the queue in a queuing manner. I had to ask “are you in the queue” and the women said “no” - what the fuck go and stand over there or sit with the very loud Italian people!

But the KLM plane was great. The TV in the back of the seat was bigger and had more colours than my first TV - which was black and white. There was a remote control in the seat not the arm rest which meant when you got up you had not managed to wrap it around your leg or arm or neck and straggle yourself. The headphone jack was in the seat not in the arm rest so that when the person sat next to you got up and then wanted to get out you had to unplug it and then try and rewind the film back to where you left the audio or make them wait whilst you paused it with the remote control which had just hit you in the nuts as you had stood up and which had then triggered it to rewind back into the headrest and on its way thanks to its own momentum gone past the hole for it and smacked you in the eye. But all being said it had the important button for widescreen - I shit you not and even better it came with an episode of “Top Gear” and “James May’s toy stories” which I of course being a Mayist Clarksonite have seen but can and must always watch again.

to be continued……..

(Yes I am still ranting about this)