More humiliations for being a wimp of the air

It is mildly disconcerting for any ageing macho farmer when a female colleague turns down her nose at you for being a wimp, but such was my fate last week when I vowed never to take to the skies again after hearing of that unfortunate Egyptian air disaster over the Mediterranean.

I’m not totally phobic about getting into the air and have managed shortish forays into the skies, sometimes with the aid of some medically non-recommended fortifications, but as for a trip to Australia or California, well that’s very definitely a no-no.

And I know that I’ve been told all the old lines that ‘when your time is up, it’s up’ and ‘if you’re going to go, you’re going to go’, but whenever I have to eyeball Peter at the pearly gates and outline a raggle-taggle of potential entry qualifications, I don’t want it to be after falling seven or eight miles out of the sky.

It probably does have something to do with a brain that from childhood never got any satisfactory answers to questions like: “Why everywhere is flat in the world even though when we look at it from space, we see a massive round globe?” or “why do people in the Antarctic and Australia manage to walk upright even though they are trying balance themselves on the underside of a ball.” Questions like that always remained unanswered around the age of five and then I gave up answering them.

Only once I think I’ve been on one of those giants of the sky, a Jumbo 747, and for the life of me, I can’t figure out how about 500 tonnes of metal can manage to ‘stay up there’ without plonking down like a giant rock into the Atlantic.

So far, all the planes I’ve been on, have managed to stay up there, and friends of mine who are big into statistics always remind me that I have massively greater chance of meeting my maker, every time I take the Hyundai out onto the public road than when I take to the skies.

I should be massively reassured by all of these things and another friend of mine always ‘swore by’ three Valium and two whiskeys about a half hour before take-off, although he did warn me that there might be a bit of a ‘cold turkey’ feeling shortly after touching down.

There are medical friends of mine who recommend a variety of antidotes to make the plane journeys far more relaxing and stressful, and I’ve been reassured that these remedies and tips do work.

For more, read this week's Connacht Tribune.