Golden Fleece

Off to Tenerife for our once a year dip into winter/summer sun and heat. The fact that we had to get up at 3.30 a.m to make an early flight took off some of the shine, especially since I am a nervous flyer.

I used to love it. When I was a child my family would take off every summer, for Spain usually, Benidorm, Torremolinos etc. I relished the sudden surge of takeoff, the delicious, slingshot force that sank my young spine into the big, cushiony seat. I gave myself to it, a pre-sexual, pre-druggy high.

Then, when I was around 15, our family ceased to take foreign holidays. For around ten years, I didn't set foot on a plane, not till 1982, when I was 25, off to San Francisco to share an apartment with my girlfriend. As soon as the plane tilted into the heavy Irish cloud I realised I was nervous, positively jumpy. What was that rattling noise, that creaking in the fusilage, that sudden clunk? I had lost faith. I no longer believed in the infallibility of the grown-up world. How could I? I was grown-up myself, and acutely aware that I was no more godlike than the hares I saw nibbling grass on the fringes of the runway. What went up could come down, prematurely.

I am not quite so nervous now (and a few G&Ts help tremendously), though I never regained my childhood delight in flying. But I do retain a sense of wonder. Being borne aloft only a couple of times a year, I am well-able to be amazed by the sheer unlikeliness of it all. To actually be injected above the sullen cloud-herd, to lean out from an angel-balcony, to be blown away, knocked down with a feather. Then tipping downwards, decanted into palmy heat and brightness, t-shirt weather, the sun clasping my bare arm, my neck.