Flu is a tense of fly

CAPE TIMES, 18 APRIL 2003

FOR EVERY CLOUD there is a silver lining, as the poet once wrote, before rejecting it as a cliché. For many the cloud is the new SARS flu virus. Indeed, for many there is nothing good to say about SARS, but not for me. No sir, I use a smile as my umbrella. For all its obvious drawbacks – the sneezing, the shortness of breath, the involuntary dying – SARS has given me a ray of hope.

I have been impressed with the alacrity shown by our authorities in taking measures to nip SARS in the bud. Of course, they have a lot of alacrity to spare, considering how little they used up on AIDS, but still. Naturally, one man’s alacrity is another man’s opportunity. For many years now I have been wrestling with one of the thorniest problems of contemporary life: how to avoid economy class.

The economy-class section of an aeroplane has become to me as the headmaster’s office was when I was a small boy, or as the dark space under the bed was when I was an even smaller boy – I fear it with all my mortal being. I sweat and itch and swoon when I think of having to go there. Fortunately, not for the same reasons – I don’t actually think some enormous child-devouring crocodile of darkness will swallow me, nor do I really anticipate that I will be sexually interfered with by my headmaster in economy class – but there are horrors back there that make me quite shrill with terror.

Babies; fat people with arms the size of legs trying to share your armrest; babies; junior businessmen who smell of Axe deodorant and read self-help books; babies – these are the sorts of wretches and villains with whom no civilised individual should have to share personal space, yet in economy class they are thrust upon you as plagues of boils and locusts were thrust upon the ancient citizens of Egypt. Short of actually shelling out the hard cash to join the sports administrators on the other side of the blue curtain, however, there has been nothing one could do about it. Until SARS.

I have hit upon a cunning wheeze to lift myself out of purgatory, the next time I travel any sort of distance in economy class. I will tell you but you can’t use it yourself, or they will soon rumble us, those airline swines. It was with a certain interest that I read the reports of passengers boarding flights, buckling up, then beginning to snuffle and croak and ostentatiously blow their nose on the hems of stewardesses’ skirts. “Are you all right, sir?” ask the stewardesses, backing away.

“Well,” say the passengers, “yes, although I seem to have suddenly come down with the symptoms of flu, not to mention unusual respiratory complications. Do I feel hot to you?”

“Have you been to Asia recently, sir?” the flight crew ask, wrapping their faces in the blue curtain.

“Well,” say the wily passengers, “no, although I did eat at the Mai Lai Oriental Barbeque joint a few days ago.”

Without further ado they are swept away from the assembled fiends and atrocities of economy class and are quarantined in blissful seclusion at the rear of the aircraft in a curtained cubicle. For the rest of the flight they do not have to see, hear or breathe the body odour of another human being. To be sure, you have a certain amount of inconvenient medical examination to endure when you arrive, but that, my friends, is a small price to pay. Book me a seat. I am ready to go travelling.