Another Aeroplane, Another Sunny Place

His legs climb up the steps to the airplane, pausing in the queue outside the plane ever so often as the passengers inside the plane find their seats and scramble to push their luggage into the overhead compartment.

There is a plastic smiling stewardess who looks at his boarding pass and tells everyone where to go, as if they were incapable of finding their seats themselves.

He finds his seat next to the window, and plants himself next to another person who will share his space, but not his life, for the next hour or so.

The seats are stiff, he pays little attention to the perfunctory safety demonstration by the stewardesses at the start of the flight. He flicks through the on-board magazine absently as the plane begins to take off.

The plane propellers creak as they lift the airplane and its eighty four passengers skywards. He leans forward in his seat and looks outside as the world distances itself from him. The roads that seemed eternal when the taxi brought him to the airport were now just lines - perimeters surrounding the jigsaw puzzle pieces of mismatched green and brown earth beneath him.

Below him a million lives were being lived, a hundred thousand dramas unfolding, thousands of people leaving to hundreds of different destinations, convincing themselves that their problems and worries were important, when in truth, from up here, it all seemed a little less consequential.

His ruminations are interrupted when the plane flies through the clouds, and as the wispy, white, fog-like surroundings obscured his vista of the world beneath, he marvelled at the fact that he is actually flying through water.

He wishes that he could roll his window down and stick his hands out and feel the clouds. He is sure in his little-boy heart that it would feel like tearing away at cotton.

Suddenly the plane bursts through the clouds and into a different world. Silent as the South pole and just as beautiful, the sea of clouds formed their own winter wonderland beneath him, peaking and dipping like soft marshamallow mountains and valleys. The sky is a vivid blue, and it never rains here.

He takes out his camera phone and switches it on, unwilling to let such beauty pass him by. There is a little flurry of excitement in his heart as he turns it on. In the cinema of his mind, the plane takes a sudden noseward dip towards the earth, sending screaming passengers and stewardesses and the on-flight meal trolleys crashing toward the front of the plane, hurtling at six hundred kilometres per hour towards earth.

He feels both relief and disappointment when his Vodafone backed Nokia did not create the airplane catastrophe threatened by the stewardesses at the start of the flight. He captures the breathtaking view quickly and covertly, and he stows away his camera phone before it is confiscated by the friendly staff of the airplane.

He smiles a secret smile, feeling triumphant, as once more, he has cheated Death.