Up in the air

I spent a day in Delhi earlier this week (and catching up with myself after that has made it impossible for me to write this blog) and seemed to be more on a plane getting there and back than at what I was in the city for. And much of it featured me looking at the proceedings with my eyes and mouth (oops!) goggle-open and aghast. Otherwise I would be staring at whatever it was I was staring at with incipient giggles and suppressing the odd hiccup.

My flight to Delhi was on a budget airline, since all I had to do was go there in the morning, be at a couple of meetings and fly back a few hours later. I had never flown one of these before and am not sure I want to do it again. The service was decent, the timings were passable and the treatment was fine. But it was the food that got to me. On most airlines that I have flown, you do not have to pay for water. Or even for food, though some American carriers do charge for snacks. Here, they offered small half-litre bottles of mineral water ‘complimentary’, one per passenger, and everything else had to be paid for. Which meant you were given horrible food at prices that seemed, even to my blasé mind, overblown and beyond the believable pale. A very bad (or so it looked) cheese sandwich for twice what it would be worth on the ground and about four times what it is actually worth would give anyone a bad case of indigestion. And if you wanted more water, you needed to fish deep in your wallet. But then, for those who are hungry and have no access to food other than what is being sold up in the air, does it matter?

The friend I went to see first off the plane told me her little secret. Every time she flies, which she does often enough to make budget flying worthwhile, she takes with her a small box of food for the trip. It gives her something to fill the empty space in the tummy and saves her from the ghastly airline food that is so often dished out. It is exactly what I have read about for years in various papers and magazines, but never really paid any attention to. After all, most of the time that I travel, I either do not eat, or stick with the fruit and water combination that suits my tastebuds and my tummy quite well.

It is perhaps just three or four times that I have ever eaten a meal on a plane that was even remotely edible and pleasurable. The first time was on a flight from Athens to Frankfurt, when I was a stout little almost-ten-year-old. It was another first for me: my first ever experience, albeit not my last, of the long slim sausage called the ‘frankfurter’. Being a bit of a gourmand, if not yet a gourmet, I gobbled down the two wursts that came as part of lunch and belched happily. But then we hit some turbulence and the hot dogs rebelled. Just as we were getting off the plane, walking down the aisle to the door, my sausages and I parted company, painfully for all involved. But the memory of the meal lingers…

A flight to London from New York on a Canadian airline gave me a truly delicious meal. I ate a delicately poached and very large and succulent shrimp, nicely wrapped around a subtle cheese. There was also a small slab of whitefish, perfectly cooked and bathed in a delightfully herby sauce. Nothing was congealed or slimy, nothing was semi-raw or rubbery; it was all just so, just right, just perfect. Surprisingly, Indian Airlines, when it was still called that, once served up a ‘diet’ meal, with tender grilled chicken, herb-flecked boiled potatoes and fresh fruit – a wonderful change from the usual over-cooked and over-spiced fare that has you wondering why it exists.

Maybe too many questions of that kind made budget airlines decide to cut the food rations!