Sleepy Brain: Brit Blog
‘Hey now, baby, I’m beginning to see the light…’ The author, waiting to go through customs, ponders the notion of ‘flightless travel’ (photo: Simon Sellars 2007).

At one stage I used to listen to people whingeing about long plane flights and think they were dullards with no imagination, that I was above them (literally) because I was a space nut and flying to me was the closest I’d ever get to floating in space. I positively relished 24-hour flights from Melbourne to London. I was a fool.

When I was considerably younger and embarking on my first flights, I would carry in my mind a story far more essential than any hand luggage. It was something I’d read about old-time astronomers who were so puzzled by the lack of landmass on gas giants like Jupiter and Saturn that they had to invent bizarre aliens. They told the world that these unfeasible creatures — shaped like fleshy zeppelins — populated the swirling clouds and raging storms of these enormous gassy planets instead of giving the world the truth: that space was as sterile as their research. But it was inconceivable to the humanist mind that barren energy could exist, devoid of life of any sort, so the myth caught fire.

I used to make sure I had a window seat on long-haul flights, and from there I’d recall those ancient astronomical images, artists’ renditions from yellowing copies of Time-Life that my parents owned. Pressing my nose against the jet’s tiny window, I would populate Earth’s skies with them, visualising among the clouds those hovering, billowing puffballs with their huge, rounded eyes, bared razor-sharp teeth and enormous mouths, which served as air-intakes for the wretched creatures, sucking in the methane-poison of Jupiter (or, in this case, the clouds of Earth) to be ejected out the back of their ridiculous bodies, propelling their pulpy bulk through that hell-world.

I made my own fun.

Now I hate flying. It’s become possibly one of the most stressful ‘elective’ activities a person can put themselves through, except for moving house and divorce. I hate having to seal my toothpaste in a plastic bag. I hate the notion that someone thinks my toothpaste could blow up a plane. To wait an hour, two hours, while my bag waits to be searched, despite the fact its sole contents are a pair of dirty boxer shorts, a can of deodorant and a belt, and they can see that on the X-ray — that’s hell. Smelling the paranoia in the queues as we are all herded towards security and through the metal rings like cattle to the slaughter, cattle that’s beside itself with fear because it *knows* what’s coming. Terrorist culture — maintaining the fear — keeps us all in line.

I no longer have the brain-space to devote to alien fantasies. Now when I fly I just want to sleep and get it all over and done with and wake up at the other end. Valium might help. Or smack. But I’ve never been into either so I resort to gin and tonic in the hope that I can knock myself out. But the seat, made for thinner, shorter people in a different age just won’t do and the food is unrecognisable, but that’s always been a given, nothing that can be done about that.

It’s just not fun anymore is it? And I know I’m not the only one who thinks that way because I know there’s a global movement underway, a mass-psych experimental travel meme to find and make viable means and ways of ‘flightless travel’, and I’m definitely investigating that for my next trip, but for now I simply have to make do. Watch a movie perhaps, but inflight movies are as crap as the food, everyone knows that. ‘Four Weddings and A Funeral’; ‘Rocky Balboa’; chick flicks; Steven Seagal; unspeakable Tom Hanks atrocities; Guy Ritchie and Madonna.

But I was flying with Emirates, thank God, and Emirates has ICE, a ‘next-generation’ in-flight entertainment system. ICE has a ‘classic movie club’ — around 30 selections including 2001, perhaps the ultimate inflight movie (any Kubrick would do me) and the original Dirty Harry, which still packs a punch, and which contains a Lalo Schifrin score that’s funky, fuzzed out and completely over the top; D.H. is always worth seeing/hearing for that reason alone. Plus another 50 recent releases including Children of Men, something I missed when it came out. A lot of recent TV, too, like Life on Mars. Plus classic-rock albums on the audio channels, and not just overrated cock rock like Zeppelin but quality dirge-metal like Sabbath, and even some new wave and postpunk like Siouxsie. Best of all, it has the facility to rewind, fast-forward and pause films. It seems incredibly complex to set up separate feeds for each seat, but that’s exactly what they’ve done: movies are stored in a central computer and accessed by each viewer as required. I couldn’t quite believe that someone, somewhere, had finally listened to consumer demand, that someone had finally recognised the keyword ‘choice’. I felt a huge wave of relief wash over me when I discovered ICE.

ICE, then, made the flight basically bearable. But so did the lady next to me. She was rocking her little boy to sleep and he was clearly terrified by the turbulence. But he was being a good little soldier, keeping quiet and trusting mum. And mum was a real angel, with a smile that told him all he needed to know. When he was finally asleep she struck up a conversation with me and we managed to kill a few hours. Sometimes that’s all you need to iron out the stress. And I was smitten with the boy’s demeanour — he really was such a good kid — because the plane was really bumping; it gave me pause, to say the least. Then they were both asleep and I turned to 2001.

I knocked back a few more gin and tonics and then I watched Children of Men. And the impact blew me backwards. I’ve noticed (noticed? I’ve been disturbed by) a peculiar apocalyptic shakedown on the streets of Melbourne over the past few years, following a similar undercurrent that shook me to the core when I lived in London in 2001. It’s actually too huge to go into here, but it’s something I’ve been trying to articulate over here and here. To be confronted with this on the screen was just too much — Children of Men’s scenes of urban anarchy were chilling. They synched exactly with this vision in my head. The impact, even on this tiny back-seat screen, was immense, especially in a sleepless, semi-tipsy state. I couldn’t get over it and I kept rewinding and watching that unforgettable scene where the forest-dwelling crusty-feral traveller types ambush Clive Owen and his gang. There’s a lot of detail in that film, detail that’s just so jarring. The unexplained attack on the train by some vicious, half-seen gang; the doped-up guy with the tattooed face and neck playing some kind of virtual reality game that seems directly wired to his skin; the Pink Floyd pig floating past the window; the ultra-strange choice of very early King Crimson on the soundtrack, in among kode9 and Aphex Twin tracks; the rubbish and absolute despair etched into the buildings and street scenes…yes, the story has severe melodramatic flaws, but so does Blade Runner. Sometimes the setting is the story; the streets live and breathe as characters; the city is alive in these films, pulsing with an artificial intelligence that, in this case, is fetid, rotting at the core.

When you’re on a plane watching this, who needs puffball aliens?

Sleepy Brain: Children of Men
The scene that did my head in (still from Children of Men; dir. Alfonso Cuaron).

I fell asleep to anarchic dreams and woke on the descent to Heathrow. The weather looked cold and grey. From the air I could see some urban ruins. Some smoke in the distance. We landed. It took forever to get through customs. People were in endless lines, looking miserable. The film was replaying over and over in my head; there’s a scene where illegal immigrants are herded into a refugee camp in a future dystopian England. It meshed with the scene at Heathrow. I was descending into the uncanny valley, that most spooky of voids: culture shock; the crushingly familiar made utterly strange. Future now, literally; I’d crossed however many time zones and my brain was still 24 hours into the future, superimposed onto a steel-grey past.

Jetlag. A bucking horse to be ridden. It flattens perspective, time and memory. I hadn’t said goodbye to the lady and the boy. I was shunted along ahead of them and then they disappeared. Our conversation seemed decades in the past. I was confused and sad. I’ve been through all this before and still it gets me. Circadian rhythms; do not mess with them, ever.

Then I was out of Heathrow on the Tube train to London without really realising it and I noticed that every bloke was wearing similar boot-cut jeans and patterned t-shirts. Some of the t-shirts were pink. The Beckham fauxhawk still, somehow, remained a popular haircut for males. There were big sunglasses on all the women and fake bling everywhere. Tottering high heels were common. Lacquered hair was popular. There was an old huge bald man reading a huge leather-bound book called How We Used to Live: the Britain of Old. He kept looking up at the passengers then darting back to the pages as if seeking solace. He was in very good nick for his age and looked like he wanted to bust some heads. But all the lads on the train were huge, too. Roid rage.

I was close to passing out from exhaustion. My backpack weighed a ton. I’d brought too many books as usual. I just knew at that point that I’d never read any of them. I felt like handing them out on the train. They were mostly Ballard and experimental travel books; would anyone even want them? We’d just passed Osterley and there were 15 more stops to go until Victoria.

From there I had to interchange to Norwich.

I watched the two girls across from me. They were speaking native Spanish and they were tall and their nails were pink. They were super supreme and confident and they were eating Big Macs. They weren’t trash; their grooming smelt of lots and lots of cash. They just didn’t care about eating Big Macs. I remembered being in a McDonalds in Munich where you could buy beer and where there were Salvador Dali prints on the walls. Depraved, decapitated vaginal Dalis, too.

Europe sure is different; in Australia we have Formula 1 cars on the walls of our McDonalds.

‘England is not Europe but it does have McDonalds’ — that was all my sleepy brain could think of. I couldn’t even summon up the energy to recognise that these Spanish girls were incredibly beautiful.

Because I’d fallen asleep, finally.

..:: NEXT STOP
+ Norwich

..:: PREVIOUS STOP
+ Melbourne Airport