I am sorry to report that the aviation industry’s biggest killjoy is up to his usual tricks. Not content with stripping Ryanair services of every scrap of human decency, charging for bags, boarding passes and glasses of water and once threatening to offer standing tickets, budget-flight baron Michael O’Leary is calling for last orders on airport pints. The chief executive has called for UK airports to ban the pre-flight pint, claiming in The Times that his airline is forced to divert flights almost daily because passengers are getting too rowdy.
There are two types of British fliers. The neurotic, anxious holidaymaker who plans four different contingency plans should their journey to the airport be disrupted and who insists on arriving at least three hours ahead of take-off time, even when it’s a domestic flight that doesn’t even require a passport, let alone a checked bag.
To them, an airport is not a necessary evil, a holding pen for the stressed and feral through which we must endure. It is, instead, a sort of Westfield food court, only with more screaming kids with iPads, more carry-on luggage to trip over, and an atmosphere of endless, ambient peril. They think that getting there earlier will minimise the chance of delays, cancellations, losses, but really they just prolong the nightmare, and risk getting so comfortable they miss the gate call or drain their phone batteries.
Then there are the others: the type to take their chances, who don’t bother separating their liquids, who get to the airport with no more than 90 minutes to go and proceed straight to gate via an overpriced Pret A Manger, buying travel insurance and replying to emails and sticking their out of office on in the security queue. If something goes wrong and they miss the plane, well, it’s only the same amount of money they’d have spent at Giraffe or Gordon Ramsay or Burger King (all are equally extortionate in transit) to feed a family of four and kill time before the flight. And at least they didn’t have to spend any extra time in that airless purgatorial zoo.
I am in the latter camp. I have never arrived an airport with enough time to grab a mini bottle of contact lens solution at Boots, so the idea of parking up at Wetherspoon’s for a pre-flight drink holds some exotic glamour for me. How civilised and relaxing it must be to start one’s holiday with a little celebration.
But, so I hear, many people do like to arrive early – and have a pint before they fly. This obviously surprises me hugely. Well, not quite. The British are not known for enjoying alcohol with dignity and moderation, so unsurprisingly some people go a bit loopy and overdo it when they’re trapped in the most frenzied place on Earth, whose only redemptive attribute is that UK licensing laws don’t apply and they are free to booze at 6am.
O’Leary’s had enough of it. It’s got worse because of drugs, too. More people are “shoving powder up their noses”, he says, which means rather than passing out after a few too many, they’re getting “hyper”. “I fail to understand why anybody in airport bars is serving people at five or six o’clock in the morning,” he said. “Who needs to be drinking beer at that time?”
Erm, anybody about to board a Ryanair flight, for a start. Those of us unable to learn from our mistakes who continue to be seduced by the actually-no-longer-cheap prices know that it is a Faustian pact. You will be sleep deprived because of the ludicrous flight times and lose both a day at home fretting and a day of your trip recovering. You’ll be held up on the other side handing over your biometric data because of new EU regulations, and you may well face further travel time because the airports are often so out of the way of any desirable destination. Any baggage a millimetre wider than the horrible blue cage will be confiscated and slapped with a €70 (£60) surcharge if the sour flight attendant is having a bad day, and you’ll be so uncomfortable contorting yourself to fit in the seat it’ll take a month sleeping in rabbit pose to get your spine back into place.
A stiff straightener to take the edge off – and increase your chances of sleeping through the punishment – is many Britons’ coping mechanism of choice and must be defended. It offers us a very slim opportunity to delude ourselves that “holiday mode is activated”, when actually we have a couple of hours of prison mode to get through first.
Now, look, I know bad Brit abroad behaviour is nothing to be proud of. Lager louts bring shame on the rest of us – I must note here that O’Leary points out the women are as bad as the men – and make us a laughing stock to our European neighbours, and have given us an appalling reputation. We all know you can’t be kicking off at flight attendants after one or seven too many – and everyone’s heart sinks when they see a stag do boarding their flight to Palma. We sneer at classless hooligans getting tanked before a flight. We give knowing, sympathetic looks to the Spanish businessmen and quiet German backpacking pensioners queuing next to us to make sure they know that “we are not them”.
And yet. Lad culture might take brutish, competitive stupidity to extremes, but there is a little part of us that admires it. At the airport, the promise of a 6am pint can tempt even the most uptight and stiff-upper-lip Brits to lighten up. It feels forbidden, it feels dangerous, it feels spontaneous and daft and while it’s no “flare up the bum and stormed Wembley”, for many repressed Brits it is the moment that a year of built-up tension, and certainly several days of holiday tension, releases at last and we are finally free to escape.
Suffering all year and having miserable lives so we can go mad and lose the plot on holiday is what being British is. If Michael O’Leary gets airport pints banned, it won’t just be a fuel crisis facing British tourists this season – but an identity one.