So here’s the thing, why did we travel to the other side of the world on Olympic Airways? Well, it was cheap. And we soon found out why...
As we took off from Heathrow the emergency door we were sitting next to flexed. At first I thought it was just my eyesight adjusting to the change in air pressure. Sadly, it wasn’t. When I looked more closely I could see the edges had been amateurishly sealed with what looked like Polyfilla, only the flexible one, which I suppose was good because it just moved rather than cracked right open.
The draught from this ill-fitting door was fearsome and by the time we reached cruising height my teeth were chattering and I believed I had severe frostbite. I knew then why the old woman on my left was wearing a thick woollen coat, hat and gloves and clutched a hot-water bottle. Or maybe it was a parachute. Either way she was a seasoned Olympic Airways traveller, of that there was no doubt.
The airhostess sits facing you on take-off, sitting on a little jump seat. If she works for Olympic Airways she readjusts and reapplies her make-up in the time between strapping herself in, taking off and levelling out. Then she gets up, gives you a tight smile which says, “now I have to serve these people who have paid for the very cheapest trip across the world,” and then she goes away and is not seen again for the duration of the flight. Even if you push the hostess button neither she nor any of her friends will come and see you. At first I thought the button wasn’t working but then I saw that everybody else was pushing theirs too and they got the same lack of response.
Eventually people drifted to the galley and got their own meals and drinks while the hostesses looked on with derision, smoking their American cigarettes through perfectly made-up lips and impatiently brushing stray wisps of ash from their immaculate uniforms. These Greek women were in their mid-50s, wore lots of make-up, had massive amounts of oil black hair piled on their heads and uniform jackets pinched in so tight at the waist it looked like they were all endowed with absolutely massive breasts. I assume now, having travelled with Olympic, that the jackets concealed big lifejackets, not big breasts.
As the plane climbed, thick brown gunk began to drip out of the overhead lights cluster a couple of rows in front of me. Hydraulic fluid, I thought, and then realised that I had no idea what hydraulic fluid was or why it should be anything to worry about in any case.
The brown gunk dropped down onto the perfectly white jacket of an English colonial type who was going to Corfu. He bellowed so loud that no hostess would dare go near - or maybe they just couldn’t be bothered to get up - and eventually a uniformed man strode down the steeply sloping floor clutching a torch. He shone the torch at the lights cluster. I don’t know why he did this because it was perfectly light in the plane. “Nothing to worry about,” he grunted.
“I’d say there is!” said Corky Colonial, “look at my suit. I demand to see the Captain!”
“I am the Captain.”
This worried me because, I mean call me old fashioned, but shouldn’t the captain be up front flying this apartment block with wings?
“We will have it cleaned for you,” said the Captain and then he shone his little torch out of the window and frowned. Was he wondering where we were? Or checking the wings for cracks? Neither of these thoughts filled me with great confidence. Anyway, that was that. After he strode off we neither saw nor heard from him again.
The other thing about Olympic is that they have a policy on hand luggage - you can bring on as much as you want.
The old woman who sat next to me had 15 plastic bags. I counted them as she wedged them under the seat in front of her. In the struggle to get every one of them under the seat she found another package, which she picked up, turned over and over and looked at in a puzzled way. I pretended to be asleep. Eventually she turned to the bloke sitting nearest her in the adjacent row of seats and asked, “Is this yours.” He looked at her. “That’s your lifejacket,” he said.
“Oh,” she said, and looked around for somewhere to put it. She shrugged and then wedged it into one of her own plastic bags and pushed it under her seat. Presumably it is now in a drawer in a house in Thessalonica, which is where it will stay, possibly for generations.
When she dies her family will have no idea how come she came to be in possession of a Boeing 747 lifejacket, and presumably in the millennia to come it will turn up in some archaeological dig and be a constant mystery to generations of historians.