From Flores

Oh how I love book exchanges! This made me laugh, and is travel related so thought I would share it.

Copied with respect, but without permission, from A Spot of Bother (by Mark Haddon).

¨His main memories were of sweaty pre-packed cheese and that roar as the toilet bowl opened into the stratosphere. At first he had noticed only that everyone in the departure lounge was driving him to distraction. And when they boarded, something in the cloistered, chemical air of the cabin itself had made his chest feel tight. But only when they were taxiing to the runway did he realize the plane was going to suffer some catastrophic mechanical failure mid-flight and that he was going to cartwheel earthwards for several minutes inside a large steel tube with 200 strangers who were crying and soiling themselves, then die in a tangerine fireball of twisted steel.

He stared doggedly at the seat-back in front of him, trying desperately to pretend that he was sitting in the living room at home. But every few minutes he would hear a sinsiter chime and see a little red light flashing in the bulkhead to his right, secretly informing the cabin crew that the pilot was wrestling with some fatal malfunction in the cockpit.

For several weeks afterwards he was unable to see a plane overhead without feeling angry.

It was a natural reaction. Human beings were not meant to be sealed into tins and fired throug the sky by fan-assisted rockets.¨