Better Flying Through Chemistry

The one major flaw in any intercontinental travel for me is this: you need to fly. Now, in principle I like the ides of flying. I love take-off and landing and I love being able to travel so far, so quickly. However, somewhere deep in my lizard brain, the primitive part of me hates turbulence. It pumps adrenaline into my system with such force that, all of a sudden, I want to fight, to attack, to break things. Clearly, this is not a good idea on an eight hour flight across the Atlantic. And so, wrapped in a warm cocoon of prescription tranquillisers, I flew to Washington DC.

The staff at Washington airport were great: friendly, helpful and unfailingly polite. I think we Brits are in danger of relinquishing our reputation for politeness to those damn colonials. If there was any fault we could find with the staff, in fact, it was their paucity. 90 minutes is just too long to wait in a hot immigration queue, especially with a transfer flight to catch. As soon as the US authorities had my fingerprints on record, and had take a quick snap of my tranquillised face, we were free to run for the boarding gate and catch the connection to Fort Lauderdale.