This had never happened to me before. I was on the plane. Belt on, book open. A woman arrived beside me and announced: you’re in my seat.
And she was right. Her boarding pass corresponded to where I was sitting. But when I had a look at my boarding pass, it showed the same number.
The woman was instructed to stand off to the side while the other passengers got on. Thankfully, she was perfectly nice about it. We exchanged “whoops” expressions, and she made similar faces to her friend who was sitting across the aisle from me.
A member of the cabin crew went off to relay the problem to someone in the airport, a process which involved loudly spelling my surname. “M.O.N.C.R.I.E.F.F. No, F for father, not rather. Father. F for felt. No, not belt.”
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I was tempted to suggest an F-word of my own, but also had to deal with Herself’s crippling guilt. She felt I should surrender my seat or offer to be strapped to the wing. I wasn’t so keen.
[ Seán Moncrieff: Flying in a plane makes me feel like a kid againOpens in new window ]
Then an official-looking man arrived. He checked the boarding passes and got on his radio, and again felt the need to loudly spell my surname – this time with a different selection of f-words.
Eventually, an alternative seat was found for the woman, who, before she was led to the other end of the plane, said to me: “I hope you’re not going to write about this for The Irish Times!”
I merely smiled back. In this business, you’ve got to be ruthless.
But Herself was still riddled with guilt: “Now she’s separated from her friend.” Thankfully, I could see the woman at her new seat, happily chatting with the people around her. I pointed this out, and Herself was mollified.
However, I soon began to feel sympathy for the friend who had been left behind. Beside her sat two women, who may or may not have had a few drinks before boarding, but were definitely part of a hen party. I know this because they were regularly greeted by other women on the plane, many of whom wore T-shirts emblazoned with “hen party”. As a highly trained journalist, it’s my job to notice these things.
The friend was watching a documentary (Louis Theroux on the manosphere), but had to abandon that when the two hen party women relentlessly bombarded her with conversation openers. Or at least one of them did.
‘I should have counted, but it is accurate to report that she used the phrase dozens of times: there seemed to be few situations in life that she didn’t give a f**k about’
The human voice is a curious thing. Break it down, and it consists of a range of tones at different frequencies. Each mixture of tones varies from person to person. But there are some whose voice contains a particular note, at the higher end of the scale, which has a penetrative quality: it cuts through all the surrounding sound and barges into the ear canal. One of the hen party women possessed this tone, with the result that anyone within earshot couldn’t help but hear everything she said.
She posed a series of quick-fire biographical questions to the friend, who answered them with grace and patience. And when that section of that chat was over, the hen party woman related details about where she came from, her family, kids and husband. But most of all, she was keen to emphasise that she didn’t give a f**k.
I should have counted, but it is accurate to report that she used the phrase dozens of times: there seemed to be few situations in life that she did give a f**k about. Not giving a f**k emerged as her fundamental philosophical position. A kind of jolly nihilism, but delivered in a highly excited manner.
When we finally landed, the friend looked slightly exhausted by all this ontological exploration and seemed keen to disembark. While we waited to get off, we overheard other passengers say that further up the plane, someone had fainted. And they say air travel isn’t exciting any more.
