I came across this old article, written some time ago while mucking out an old disk drive. It made me laugh - which I know isn’t really cool, but I’m past caring.

Perhaps I’m odd, maybe I’m just wound too tight or could it be I did something very bad in a previous life. I’ve tried all sorts of things. Closing my eyes, listening to soothing (I understand the term is ‘chill-out’) music, watching a movie I’ve already seen twice, reading, self-hypnosis of various kinds; like thinking of the sequence of Newcastle results from the Fairs Cup winning campaign of 1968-69 including lines ups and goal scorers, recalling the result in all the Reading electoral wards since the current boundaries were introduced including the Labour candidates, the sequences of stations on the London underground, the nations of South America, Africa, the States of the Union, naming all of the 43 English counties in sequence and reciting the two times table backwards in Welsh starting at two thousand¹ but nothing works.

Sleeping on planes just isn’t for me.

In the spectrum of life’s little inabilities this is really quite minor. Things could be much worse. I’m not one to moan about my lot. Really. I mean look at it like this. I’m 45 (more than some people get), fit-ish (except for the occasional bad back and a couple of stones of affluence around the waist), well off enough not to want for very much, relatively independent, nice kids (at least everyone else tells me so, or they are too polite to say otherwise), decent job with nobody telling me what to do and what not to do, a reasonable house in a very well off part of England. In fact, by global standards, that makes me one of the super rich - we all are. Just about everybody I know these days is comfortably middle class, aspiring and home owning. If not they are reasonably well off even by the standards of South East England. As you move out of the working classes your friends do too. It’s just a fact - I meet tons of working class people, but generally I don’t have working class friends anymore and I’ve long since stopped caring or feeling guilty about it. The way the world is you just have to accept the fact that we white honkies are loaded relative to your average Thai, better off than your basic Bengali and considerably richer than than 98% of three of the world’s continents. Some say poverty is relative. I say that’s all very well but it doesn’t stop me thinking that there is something a little immoral in my kids spending more on Pokamon Cards or Barbies than the average kid in Mali has to live on in a year. Let them eat Barbies, indeed.

But you sometimes you just can’t help wanting what the other person has got. Envying the ability of the person next to you, or in my case including the rest of my Pokamon rich, Nike clad, Gap wearing crowd that is my family. It is sheer desperate envy which takes over, against all of my better judgement. I just can’t help wondering why can’t it be them and not me? I’ve worked out that my affliction hits between five and ten per cent of the population at most. I’ve calculated it with reasonable anecdotal observation and random sampling. Samples of 400 at a time suggest as few as ten or as many as 25 may have the same problem. This clearly suggests a syndrome (or at least it would in America - who am I kidding, it almost certainly has a name, several PhD’s written on it and a research institute in Santa Clara is investing endless hours searching for a cure).

Nonetheless, a moment of clarity has now convinced me that we happy breed are all right. We are OK. We are normal - whatever that means. Unnatural acts we don’t perform, we 5% are at one with the planet. Our ying and our yang are balanced and our feng is bleedin’ well shuied. Why - because sleeping on planes is just too weird for words.

A 747 holds 400 or so people mostly travelling in some kind of steerage. After a while on any flight of any distance the overwhelming majority of this cargo get at least a couple of hours sleep - some of them seem to sleep most of the time - but there is a hard core of walking dead like myself who just can’t do it. Fall asleep at the table in a restaurant, fall asleep at a gig, sleep through a very loud movie, sleep without fail in the theatre, sleep though just about anything on land - no problem. Sleep on a gently rocking, rhythmic train, on a chugging coach and even at a push in a car at night but sleep on an aircraft in the middle of the day (which is night) but I know very well is in fact day - no chance. Sleep inside a washing machine - about as much chance - it’s still really noisy and shakes a lot, but I know how a washing machine works. I don’t have to suspend disbelief when my clothes come out clean. I did listen in that bit of Physics. No, I really did listen. Thrust, aerodynamics, momentum, critical velocity or something, whatever. But with a plane how big? Weighing how much? Carrying how many pairs of shoes? Naah, you’re having me on. And then I’M the weird one when I can’t sleep!

What’s more, if I sleep I miss Monday completely.  Just like getting way too drunk, but without the general bonhomie that goes with too much Tesco’s Aussie Red. 1^st December - where did that go. At least when you can’t sleep on planes you don’t entirely lose a day - maybe it’s all a bit painful, but at least it was there for me and the twenty something others walking the aisles and looking through the porthole saying, “Usbekistan, not many lights there then.” And while we are looking on the bright side of life, Deep Vain Thrombosis is for other people - probably for those who sleep for ten hours straight and who didn’t stand all the way from Astrakhan to Delhi - if there is any justice that is.

¹. OK I made that one up.