All I want is elbow room

Whenever I fly, I wonder whether I am being videoed, in fact whether we are all be watched. Watched by airplane meal designers while they sit at a long table sipping a lovely red wine from a Riedel wine glass and slicing a medium rare fillet steak with a Jamie Oliver steak knife, while we try and manage a three course meal on a table the size of an iPad with plastic cutlery, water in jelly like tubs with foil lids that have been super glued down, and wine served in cups just to ensure it is a special dining experience.

When you are flying for 24 hours mealtime is one of the most exciting parts of the flight, next to landing and making it through security. Both of these other two moments are also exciting, but for different reasons… landing of course is wonderful, you finally get to leave this tin can in the sky and see family, friends and or a new country. Getting through security is not exciting like landing, but after what seems like an eternity queuing watching those in front not get the gist; ‘yes shoes off – that includes your boots Mrs, yes belts off – I don’t give a damn if your jeans may fall down lesson learned get better fitting jeans next time’. By the time you get to walk through the security machine you feel like punching the air like Rocky at the top of the stairs ‘yes, I made it… I am a champion, I am the champion of security checks’.

I digress …As soon as you sit down on a Qantas plane you wait for the menu card to be given to you. To give you time to ponder and decide what meal choice will be made on this flight. Mushy beef Stroganoff or vegetable penne pasta that will also be slightly mushy so as not to strain the plastic cutlery that will be accompanying the meal. The delay in the air stewards giving you the menu card adds to your excitement and slight frustration. Show me my options!

There is no doubt that everyone struggles with eating their meal in economy. Each time I fly I think I get closer to perfection in managing my meal plate.

The first hurdle is getting your meal to your plate. If you are at the window seat there is a chance the meal won’t make it across to you. You watch your meal as it is precariously passed down from passenger to passenger. The next hurdle is managing the meal on my iPad-sized tray.  I must consider how best to eat this meal without annoying the person next to me, without losing an item overboard, which after landing on the floor really cannot be eaten again – no matter how quickly you pick it up and blow the dirt off. Without spilling part of my meal down my front – which when you see a person on the stop over in Singapore who lost part of their meal off their plastic fork onto their lap you have that small moment of delight it wasn’t you and then you move to sympathy, understanding they will be in those dirty pants for another 8 hours before arriving and seeing family/friends who then will also notice the food stain in an awkward place on the front of their pants.

Just as tricky when eating the meal is to decide what to do with the rubbish that accumulates on your mini table as you get through your meal. I think I have slowly managed this to perfection. It takes some time to work out how to move through each stage of your three-course feast without lessening the space you already don’t have, and putting rubbish on the part of the meal you haven’t eaten yet.

When I recently flew from London to Sydney, I realised that maybe getting it to perfection makes me actually look slightly crazy or with some undiagnosed medical condition. As I watched another passenger sort their meal to perfection I thought “man! you are crazy – look at you placing your items around your tray like some usual science project, who dates you!?!”… these thoughts rolled around my mind as I slowly pulled out my plastic cutlery and put my near frozen butter and bread roll on the hot mushy beef to defrost the butter and warm the roll while I poured half my wine bottle into my plastic cup (shows a level of decorum), peeled back the extra tough seal water lid and put the items of the meal I would not use together on the side of the tray. I realised, I was looking just as crazy as the man across from me who, when I looked across at him to see how similar we were, smiled at me. Nooooooo he thinks I am like him. 

Now this explains why many other passengers I see keep their tray in a mess – they don’t want to look like me, or my other fellow passenger with an undiagnosed medical condition. Next trip I will be without rules and throw rubbish on the floor and keep my tray untidy, unorganised and in a general mess. 

Who am I kidding, no I won’t! Just writing those words made me shudder with personal disappointment. I will keep striving for tray and meal placement perfection.