Coach Class. Have two words in the English language ever been more cruelly juxtaposed ?

So I booked my ticket for Monte Carlo. I fly into Nice, France. Aeroplan couldn’t guarantee me first class even if I paid them my last 80,000 points, so what’s a guy to do? I booked it in (gasp)… I had no choice y’see … I’ll be flying (choke)… e-e-e-e-conomy. After swearing I’d never go back there. Oh the indignity of it all. I mean there’s going to be a…a…a… PERSON … sitting in THE SEAT BESIDE ME! And it could be ANYBODY! No longer will I be exclusively ensconced with other first-class travellers of my ilk. Fare well rock stars, Pulitzer Prize-winning brain surgeons, and spelling bee phenoms. Have a good flight! I’ll be in the back with the honest hard-working folk. School teachers and tradesmen and periodentists, drug-addled hippies and heavy machinery operators .

I can see it now. I’ll no doubt be seated next to some overweight, comb-over bureaucrat rushing back to Nice to his grandmother’s deathbed or some fucking thing, drinking his own self into a stupor. First, he’ll bonk me on the head trying to squeeze his leatherette American Tourister Travel Bag into the tiny overhead bin. Then he’ll be wanting some kind of small talk or attention from me probably, feeling that his over-sized thigh encroaching on my seat space somehow entitles him to share his banal life problems with me. He’ll be incoherent and uninteresting and arrogant all at the same time. I’ll have to keep getting up to let him go to the can. CURSE THIS FAT FRENCH FUCK, I SHOULD BE IN FIRST CLASS WHERE I BELONG, GODDAMMIT!

I leave April 10. ( Which would have been my Dad’s 99th birthday. That’s gotta be a good omen, no? )