Club Class…

I had a dream last night. It was one of those blissful ones, where you feel infused with consummate inner contentment and don’t want to wake up. No, not that sort of dream… I was on a fat wage and flying home from the Middle East with a spring in my step and a light winter tan: I was riding the Gravy Express, and it was never going to hit the buffers…

I was back in the bosom Business Class being served champagne by tender and solicitous air stewardesses. I like air stewardesses. They’re forthright and stitched-up tight (that wasn’t supposed to rhyme, but I’m going with it). And they bring you food. And serve you drink. You’re their entire world, but they won’t let you shag them. They’ll bestow pretzels or lavish smoked almonds upon you, but there’s no chance of a high altitude knee-trembler in the galley… They’re attentive, obedient but entirely unavailable – which makes them all the more alluring. Like saucy aunties or Mme. Marinette the French supply teacher…

“Kleenex?”

Anyway, back inside the gilded precincts of the dream, I’d been priority boarded and, drink in hand, was reclining magisterially in my capacious seat. The vexed and sweating proles were filing past with their hand-luggage as I agonised over the menu for the forthcoming four-course silver service supper. They felt my pain… As they reluctantly shuffled toward Steerage, their expressions were in turns envious and septic. I couldn’t hold their gaze. Not because I was crushed by bourgeois guilt, but because I was trying to find the button to call the strewardess for a refill of champers. On Royal Jordanian you had to drink champagne, firstly because it was free and would be rude not to, and more importantly because Muslims can’t mix a drink. It’s like asking Stevie Wonder to paint a rainbow.

My reverie ended abruptly as I struggled to downshift into second to get up a hill on the A259. An eleven year old 1.6 Astra just doesn’t have the torque of an Airbus 340. Since the battery had died last week there was no inflight entertainment either, as the radio now offered nothing but, “safe mode” and wouldn’t turn on. The only vocal accompaniment was the kids shrieking in the back like searing white noise. (They ought to have employed my children at Abu Ghraib…)

The car pre-dated the iPod and the CD, so it was with a little mental heel-click of delight, that I remembered that I was packing an old Tescos bag full of a Maxell C90 cassettes in the passenger foot well. I’d acquired them last week for one pound at the local carboot. (If you ever want to feel better about yourself and your life chances, by the way, go to a carboot sale: regard the children dressed like Latvian prostitutes, admire the vendors, gaping over a trestle with tongues lolling like offal in a butcher’s bucket, savour the aroma of mechanically recovered patties searing on a filthy grill… You soon feel pretty upwardly mobile, I can tell you.)

Anyway, I knew that somewhere in the bag of cassettes was The Best of Hall and Oates. In fact, if I’m honest, that’s why I bought it. ‘You can’t beat a bit of Hall and Oates to transport you into an invigorating day-glo world of up-tempo soul-rock fusion’, as I always say. I bade Mrs D root around in the bag for the choice melodies and she half-heartedly produced the tape. Quickly verifying the title, which was scrawled haphazardly in green biro, I slammed it into the cassette deck whilst shifting ostentatiously into third and flooring it.

“I Can’t Go For That (No Can Do)”

Someone had taped over Hall and Oates…

I’d forgotten about Wigfield… Not that I particularly wanted to be reminded.

We ground resignedly up the hill with “Saturday Night” blaring relentlessly from our tinny speakers. A dolly mixture hit me on the back of the head. I shifted back into second.

Economy Class…