07 January 2016
Pop?
Pills and long distance flights.
By Chin Chin
Cartoon Andrew Kenning
“To pop or not to pop, that is the question,” and, as in all the best soliloquies, it is asked at a time of high drama. That week in the Far East didn’t sound at all tense when it was booked. A catered villa on a sun-drenched shore, dining off sea food and drinking the local beer, sounded just what the doctor ordered as an antidote to Christmas. Yes, the odd fishing trip and lots of sleep, there is nothing too tough about that. It was only a couple of days before departure that I realised that the flight time is thirteen hours from Heathrow and that the tickets are not just economy but economy with a cheap airline.
How nice it would be if you could just die for the flight and be resurrected at your destination. That is more or less achievable in business class where the flat beds are in fact a little like coffins. Still, in tourist there are no such luxuries and you have to complete the flight upright and in cramped conditions. Should I, or should I not, take a sleeping pill?
At first sight it looks like a no-brainer. Take a pill which knocks me out for 12 hours and I will arrive well rested. But then is it sensible to render myself comatose at a time when it may be necessary to have my wits about me? Suppose that my neighbour has an unpleasant infectious disease and starts sneezing. I will be powerless to turn my head away. Suppose he starts rummaging in the overhead locker. Who will protect my new “dictator-style” dark glasses? Then if the plane comes down in the sea, could I really do all that life jacket and down the slide stuff while in a drugged condition? What too about those exercises that you read about when you are leafing through the “Health and Safety for the Adventurous” magazine? The medical expert there certainly thinks them essential if the risk of deep vein thrombosis is to be avoided, but if I try to do star jumps in the aisles while in a drugged state I may become the subject of adverse comment.
Then there is the question of timing. It is well known that the effectiveness of a sleeping pill varies with factors such as body weight, general health, how much the consumer (I am sure there is a better word for the consumer of a pill – “pillee” or “pillock” perhaps?) has eaten and lots of other factors besides. That means that it cannot be predicted exactly. What happens if I am still drugged at the end of the flight and unable to find my way off the aircraft? No doubt the authorities would get me off one way or another but it might be straight into the slammer under the local drugs and vagrancy laws if it is one of those countries which cannot distinguish the effects of a pill which has been prescribed from those of a pill which has not.
One possible answer to this is to move forward the time when the pill is taken, but that too has a drawback. I once knew a very distinguished diplomat who was to fly out to a meeting where his attendance in an alert condition was of the first international importance. He decided to take his sleeping pill just before he boarded the plane so that he could be quite sure that its effects would have worn off by the time he landed. It was an excellent plan and would have worked well if the captain had not found a fault in the plane. Boarding was postponed for four hours while it was fixed and the diplomat had to spend them pacing forwards and backwards across the gate to ensure that he kept awake enough to board the plane when the moment came.
Still, there is more to it all than this. If, for a moment, you can wrench yourself away from “Health and Safety for the Adventurous” and immerse yourself in its sister publication “Mens sana in corpore sano”[i] you will discover that it is important to your mental health to focus on the positive. So what do you gain by staying awake? Well, food to eat and films to see, of course. Let’s draw a discreet curtain over the food but, as far as the films are concerned, “see” is exactly the right word because the airline may have economised on its movie selection in which case it is often best to turn the sound off completely. That leaves you with the pictures and plenty of scope for the imagination. Is that charming young lady slinking her way across the screen a victim of crime, a femme fatale or a detective? Aha, a clue; she is pouring something. Is it medicine desperately needed by an ailing child, a fatal dose to eliminate a hated rival or a rather mean gin and tonic? Why did she slap that man? Has he betrayed her, murdered her lover or eaten the last of the chocolates? You can fit your own plot to the images and it will often be better than the original, although there may have to be a few imaginative swerves. How does a knifing fit into a romantic comedy? Oh well, perhaps they are all Italian.
One of the difficulties of watching films in this manner is that there are competing offerings from neighbouring seats. The actors on your screen are just exchanging interminable glances; are they going head to head on behalf of warring gangs or do they just fancy each other? Then one seat ahead a man in cowboy clothes shoots half a dozen people. Your attention is instantly diverted. Is it a Western or just a local news bulletin from somewhere in the US? You have no sooner begun to interpret that than the Queen appears on a screen over to the left holding a sword. Someone, it looks like an Australian, kneels before her. Yes, this is riveting stuff. She is going to execute him for treason! Go on, your Maj, get that head off! You can put it on a pole wearing one of those hats with corks round it. That should send a message to his treacherous friends back home. It is something of a disappointment when it turns out to be the Australian ambassador receiving a knighthood – and a disappointment to the Queen too, I dare say. But wait. What is going on on that screen over on the right? Snakes, in a cockpit? Is it the 2006 film “Snakes on a Plane” or that new system which enables you to see what is going on around the aircraft? The probabilities seem to be evenly balanced.
Suppose gangsters do fill the plane full of snakes and that the FBI agents are having trouble holding them back, it is the nimblest passengers who will survive. And the others? Those who took the sleeping pills? Well, they will be woken up by the slithering but will be too drugged to move, condemned to lie rigid with terror, watching, until….
That settles it. No pills for me.
[i] This being the Shaw Sheet, we are not supplying a translation for that!
