Continuing from our subject on Friday, here's another small point about airports, planes and the whole thing of flying in general. It's about the way it's packaged and presented as such a cool, relaxed and pleasurable experience when the reality is anything but...from the outset of actually booking your flights it's made to seem like some kind of exclusive, cool thing...that you are somehow one of the elite...a carefree jetsetter who's a step above all the other proles in their mediocre modes of transport...you, it positively shrieks, are *special*. The truth, of course, is astonishingly far from the perceived ideal...you are *not* special because you fly, in fact you are little more than paying cattle on a transatlantic junket, as anyone who has *ever* flown anywhere can attest to, flying is not a pleasureable experience...it's a frightful ordeal of massive queues (remember how we like those?), *intensely* uncomfortable seating, very long waits for everything, high prices and, should you be unfortunate enough to have to go on a flight of any significant duration, you will be treated to the most fiendishly painful seats *ever* to be devised by mankind! were Matthew Hopkin alive today the 'Iron Maiden', 'Red Hot Pokers' and 'Spikey Chairs' would undoubtedly be replaced by these hellish contraptions that pretend to be comfortable yet offer only the most back-cripplingly painful seating position that, when faced with the prospect of 18 hours like this, is a torment few could bear!

And how about airports eh? Presented to the populace as carefree utopias of glass and steel, excitingly architectured gateways to faraway places...or just subtly disguised human equivalents of a battery hen coop?...cramped conditions, confused people aimlessly wandering about, other confused people running about like, wait for it, headless chickens (hehehe...quite good that :P) and, in keeping with the hellish conveyance you're about to alight on, some of the most awfully uncomfortable seating known to man. Utopia? Bah! Dystopia I think ;)