Two weeks before the return flight: four or five bad seats. I don’t book any of them.

One week before departure: three or four bad seats. Not booking.

Eighteen hours before departure: one bad seat. Oh come on! Fine, as an act of protest, I’m not even going to book the only seat available to me. I’m going to leave you guys in the dark as to which of these one seats I’m going to take.

Four hours before departure: one bad seat. The same bad seat. My system has failed. You know what, assholes? Fine. I’m…. I’m not even going to check in online. Deal with that.

Three hours before departure, check-in desk: “Hmm, let’s see if we can get you a better seat.”
“Oh, that’d be great.”
“Okay, you’re going from gate S10, everything’s running on time, here’s your boarding pass.”

I look at the boarding pass: it’s the same seat. It’s from that special stripe down the middle of the plane where seats just aren’t anything. They’re not aisle (easy to get up), they’re not window (no ass in face when other people get up), they’re not front of block (infinite leg room) and they’re not back of block (guilt-free reclining). They’re just seats, reasonably comfortable seats, on a plane, that is going to fly through the goddamn air until you’re in another country, serving you free drinks as it goes.

Fine.

This is a cinnamon apple pie with maple ice cream I had shortly before my flight home. After I’d finished, the waitress noticed I was not dead and commented that “You’ve done well.” No I have not, kindly waitress. No I have not.

Waiting at the gate, the staff keep putting out announcements for British Airways passengers who’ve checked in online, and haven’t seen a BA rep at the airport yet. I sit back and smile at their misfortune. Wrong choice, suckers! You should have randomly not checked in online this time, like I randomly didn’t.

They form a queue, then everyone sees the queue and thinks we’re boarding, forming a bigger queue, which makes everyone sure we’re boarding, then they have to put out another announcement telling everyone to sit back down.

When we finally board, the lady in front of me gets an angry red beep when her boarding pass is scanned.
“Oh dear. You didn’t see a British Airways representative, did you?”
“Yes, I saw you, at this desk.”
We share a very British everyone-is-incompetent look while the rep goes off to check something. She comes back. It’s fine.

I have my passport open to the photo page with the boarding pass tucked inside – I have decided this will be one of my life skills. She scans it, it beeps red.
“Did you-”
“Yes.”
I’ll be damned if I’m going to be penalised for checking in online the one time I didn’t.
She goes off to check something, and comes back. I’m just about to explain – in what I plan to be a slightly snippy tone – exactly who I saw and where, when she leans forwards and whispers guiltily:
“You’ve been upgraded to Club.”

Jesus, now people are just going to hate me.

My first thought on the plane was “Oh man, Club Class on this flight looks just like the lowly World Traveller Plus.” Then, “Oh, that was World Traveller Plus. This is Club Class.”

Not really seats, even, but pods. Each faces the opposite way to its neighbour, so you’re left staring a stranger in the face. That’s okay, though, because a frosted glass barrier can be electricly erected between you, shooting up in nested layers like spacecraft armour. I worried a while about how to do this politely, until the person opposite did it impolitely.

FINE. Didn’t want to look at YOUR stupid face EITHER. This is how Club Class people behave: I’d only been a Club Class person for a few hours, and I’d already been planning to do the same.

The barrier seemed less like a useful feature and more like a diabolical social experiment. Take two strangers who have no reason to look at each other, sit them so they’re looking at each other, then wait to see who presses the button first. Neither of you mind, really, but unless you live to see the great cyber shunning of 2073, it’s about the only time in your life a perfect stranger will tell a robot that they don’t want to look at your face anymore.

This photo is annotated, but I can’t find a good way of embedding annotations. Click it instead.

The legroom is so preposterous that once you’ve done up your seatbelt, trying to retrieve your Highlife magazine from the seatback pocket in front of you looks like a baby straining at his pram buckle for some unreachable sweet. And it isn’t a seatback pocket so much as a fold-down footrest that completes your full length bed when you fully recline. For this reason your tray folds down from the side on an adjustable rail, running from directly in front of you to the position Club Class people refer to as “the fuck out of my way”.

The only apparent drawback was that I couldn’t put anything under my seat, because the reclining mechanism took up all the space, and I couldn’t put anything under the seat in front of me, because there wasn’t one in walking distance. I’d have to board a much smaller plane and fly there to deposit it.

The drawback was solved by an actual drawer. I had a drawer. I wasn’t just sitting there, I was moving in.

It was one of those ten hour flights that just flew by. You know – the ones that never happen. Apart from a very Club Class incident in which I managed to restrain myself from shouting “WELL IF YOU DON’T HAVE THE FUCKING POUILLY-FUME, WHY THE FUCK IS IT ON THIS FUCKING WINE LIST? HALF THIS SHIT IS SAUVIGNON, AND YOU’RE TELLING ME ALL YOU’VE GOT IS FUCKING GRIGIO? I WANT THE DELICATE FUCKING HONEYSUCKLE AROMAS GODDAMMIT.” I barely noticed the time.

And oddly, the things that really help don’t seem like they need to be expensive. All you need for an awesome flight is to be drunk, lying down, and watching a bad romantic comedy that is for some reason affecting you more than it should.

Booze and entertainment are free even in Economy, and I just don’t think people take up any more space when they’re lying down. You could have a double-bunk economy class that would be perfectly pleasant to sleep in, and if you staggered the bunks they could even sit up.

Which I guess is why they don’t do it. It’d be perfectly fine. There’d be no reason to pay two or three times a sane air fare to fly in comfort. The airline’s only economically viable option is to cause intentional discomfort to their poorest customers, and I’m not even sure it’s wrong. If they didn’t, base costs would rise and fewer people could afford to fly at all.

It’s a weird and slightly annoying piece of knowledge that’s going to make it even harder to enjoy the actually extremely nice World Traveller Plus class I’m booked on on the way back.

Next: the way back.

Club World isn’t first class, but it makes it hard to imagine what is. Do their seats go beyond horizontal, into back-breaking reflex angles? Do they face out into the open air, to guarantee three miles of leg room? After the champagne, three course meal and brandy you get in Club World, is there a heroin course?

At the airport, a thought occured: I wonder if this gets me into the lounge? I’ve travelled with people who have lounge access before, and it’s a mystical experience. It’s like being given a gigantic apartment, stocked with well prepared food, good espresso machines, a great wine rack, and a full selection of classy whiskeys, cognac, gin and cocktail ingredients. There are no staff, no prices, no explicit rules – you just help yourself.

Directions pointed to the ‘BA Conchord Lounge’, which led me to a fat man by the only door no-one in the airport was heading to. I wasn’t really sure how to say “Does my undeserved, unpaid for, random upgrade ticket get me in here?” with any degree of class, so I just showed him my boarding pass.

I noticed they’d written ‘BLUE’ on it, to make sure no British Airways staff mistook me for a Silver, Gold, Platinum, Sapphire, Diamond, Uranium or worthwhile member. I’m only a BLUE member because BA’s Executive Club is the worst RPG in the world. Every year, they steal all your experience. It’s not if you haven’t used it in a while, and it’s not because you’re not close to levelling up. I was a few points off Silver Membership, I’d used it a month or so back, and was about to use it again when BAM. Zero XP.

Blue does not get you into the BA Lounge, but Club World, I reckoned, would. The fat man, in one of the most expertly polite and helpful rejections I’ve received, explained that the Club Lounge was downstairs, then ‘back on yourself’. I pointed beneath us to confirm. He nodded.

When I actually got there, I realised it wasn’t just below where we’d been standing, it was actually in the same building. He’d made me walk two hundred metres just to avoid using the entrance reserved for Conchord members.

It was a sort of multi-story complex of lounges, and every path you takes leads you quickly and easily to the Conchord Lounge you’re not allowed into, unless you’re constructed from over 70% gold.

Luckily, a well-dressed man ahead of me helpfully blundered into every false turn towards the Conchord Lounge before realising, and redirecting himself towards the lowly Club one he and I were only good enough for. I tailed him at a safe distance to avoid each mistake.

Pretty soon, it became clear that the Club Lounge was actually above the Conchord one, making the fat man’s misdirection all the more cruel and bizarre. This general lobby area is open to everyone, only the 2D plane dividing it from the main concourse is exclusive to Conchorders.

The Club World one, marked by a life-size statue of a horse with a lampshade on its head, was just as I remembered it. And just like the Conchord Lounge, which we’d passed on the way up. Leather chairs, low coffee tables, free internet, huge sofas, wine, whiskey, brandy, gin, vodka, cognac, armagnac, chilled beer, and two hundred meters of buffet: crusty rolls, brie, pastrami, pasta salad. Other, more pungent pastas and other, more confusing rolls.

I was doing calculations in my head as to the order and quantities in which I could eat and drink these things without being ill. I’d need to avoid caffeine, since I planned to pass out on the plane, but I formulated a way to cram in pastrami and brie rolls, hot chocolate, fusilli and feta salad, gin and tonic, and the most expensive whiskey I could find that I hadn’t tried. Something old and tasting deliciously of oppression.

By the time I saw the signs, it was too late. The signs said “Ice-cream”. They signpost their ice-cream. But I was already out of both time and capacity, and slightly drunk.

At the gate, there was a ‘fast track’ queue for boarding, and my heart sunk when I saw that yes, it was for Club World passengers. I’d have to use it, it’d be ridiculous not to, but I’d also have to endure the “Asshole.” stares of everyone waiting.

In fact, though, with only one boarding pass scanner, the fast-track queue ended up moving slower than the public one. I was relieved, then, after a while, actually a little indignant.

The guy in front of me started bitching about it loudly to the person ahead.

“Asshole,” I thought.

Next: I actually fly.

I get to travel for work sometimes, and it’s made me a little demented about checking in.

The first few times you get babied, or bathroomed, or fatmanned, you accept it. But after that, you start to scheme. Getting a good seat isn’t a hope for me, any more, it’s the objective of a five-part campaign. I’ve given miniature lectures to friends on the virtues of aisle versus window, and the risk/reward mathematics of the front row – where there’s legroom aplenty, but the cots may hide a grim payload.

So I check in as close to 24 hours ahead as humanly possible. I even rush the process, when I do it, as if other people are clicking through the wizard faster than me, swiftly dragging their round-headed icons to the precious blue seats I’m trying to secure myself.

If you’re anything like this, you’ll have discovered what I have: it doesn’t work.

You get to seat selection and there are precisely three left, sprinkled amid daunting blocks of what can only be families with children, drunk rugby players, or worst of all: people with something interesting to say. To each other.

And when you walk to this seat, twenty four hours later, you’ll have noticed the ninety year old, noticed the ball of knotted grey hair that might once have been a hippy, and the man whose vestments seem to mark him out as the pope of some unrecognisable religion – all in seats that were gone when you booked. And you’ll have thought this:

Really?

All of you? All of you checked in before me? You checked in twenty-three hours, fifty nine minutes and fifty nine seconds before departure? You there, dipping your dentures in the complimentary tonic water, what browser do you use? Which e-mail address did you have them send the booking code to? Tell me how you got that seat before me, you cheating slimy fuck! Stop crying and talk!

Perhaps you’re not like this.

The whole process makes no sense to me anymore. I thought the reason you had to check in for a flight, when you don’t for a bus, is that it’s important you show up. They’ll wait for you. So they’d appreciate it if you let them know an hour or two beforehand that you’re at the airport and ready to go.

Then they started letting you do it online.

Don’t get me wrong, I appreciate the convenience. But what does checking in online actually tell you, beyond the fact that I still physically exist the day before I fly? That doesn’t seem to offer any greater assurance that I’ll actually show up for the flight in time than when I paid you crazy money for it in the first place. It just reduces the whole thing to a frantic and brutal seat race, one that has frankly cost me a chunk of my already fractured humanity.

Now I’ve learnt something even worse. The seats change. Book one 24 hours early, then try again five hours before departure. A paradise unfolds; a land of empty aisle seats, vacant blocks, even the front rows with infinite legroom. They exist, no-one’s reserved them, and they open up.

I don’t know when or by what dark magic, but it happens. Those people who couldn’t possibly have booked them before you? They didn’t. They just checked in after all the fake, placeholder people checked out.

So this time, I checked in three times.

Once way ahead of time: two seats available, both shit. Same for my return flight, almost a week later.

Then again, twenty four hours before. Nope: different seats are free, but nothing better. I can’t print my boarding pass at home anyway, though, so I just left it.

Then, the morning of departure, I check in online again. Three or four seats. In fucking Club World.

They’re even aisle seats, and why not? Club World is 50% aisle. You can’t move without bumping into an aisle, which is to say you can move without bumping into anything at all, because of all the aisles. There are seats in Club World that are both window and aisle at the same time – something modern science previously thought impossible. I took one by the lake, overlooking the valley, and confirmed.

Next: The Lounge.