Flying Out.

The thing about me and flying is that it involves a reasonable risk of going hungry. There seems to be something about ordering an egg-free meal that is beyond the airline industry. Sure they can move millions of people each year at a cost which is, frankly, a modern marvel. Despite security, safety and fuel costs, they sometimes even make a profit. Yet ask them to feed me anything other than French toast or pancakes and things fall apart. They either forget or misinterpret the request. Once I got an omelette. I wish I were kidding.

In recent years I've given up and become an airborne vegan. They seem to be able to cope with that. This time my very lovely Dunedin-based travel agent did a lot of emailing and negotiating to get my meals organised. Thai (bless their Buddhist hearts) got it right. They tend to. The downside is that with Thai the regular food would have been fine anyway, and probably pretty tasty.

Lufthansa always manage to balls it up with Teutonic efficiency. This time they actually gave me the right meal, but no one told the cabin crew. They had a freak out when I told them my "Asian vegetarian" meal was meant to be egg-free and insisted on checking it first. I imagined some kind of corpulent official food taster or perhaps an egg sniffing dog. I actually suspect no checking went on at all. My meal arrived only after my prompting: a veggie curry. This was exactly what my travel agent told me I was getting in thee first place. It was fine, although the side dishes were varying degrees of unnatural disaster. The vegetable salad tasted like what I'm sure Iago would have tasted like if Shakespeare had been a chef instead of the bard. The melon salad tasted like the same villain but played by Steven Seagal.

Lufthansa would have been forgiven if their 747s weren't so old that they're made of spruce. The seats are exactly the same as the narrow bastards I sat in back in 2001. Air New Zealand is putting in their second change of seating since then. No TVs in the seats and only small purplely CRTs in the ceiling. The movies were Valentines Day, It's Complicated and an episode of Golden Girls. Explosive decompression would have been a more entertaining option.

Still there was possibility that I may be flying on an A380 on my leg from Frankfurt to Tokyo. That would almost be worth some swollen eyes.