Travelling light

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tom_cruise_1995_09_10

Airlines would practically have to pay Tom Cruise to fly

 

FINALLY, after threatening it for years, one airline has begun calculating its fares based on passengers’ weight, so the heavier you are, the more you pay. This is very good news for certain people who’ve felt hard done by in the matter of air fares up to now: Revenge of the 50-Kilo Woman, you might say.

Samoa Air claims, though not altogether convincingly, that its decision makes for the fairest possible means of charging passengers for air travel.

“The airline industry has this concept that all people through the world are the same size,” said Samoa Air chief executive Chris Langton, positively bathing in the sudden wave of free publicity. “Anyone who travels at times has felt they have been paying for half of the passenger next to them,” he added.

The idea is that passengers will be charged per kilo, having  declared their own weight at booking. Yes, you declare your own weight. Heh heh. However, you’ll also be weighed at the check-in desk, so fibbing won’t be… Wait, hang on. You’ll be weighed at the check-in desk? In front of everyone?

This calls to mind those fairground ‘I Speak Your Weight’ machines from the 1930s, in which you insert sixpence and then stand on the machine, aghast, as details of your excess tonnage are revealed to all and sundry. The alternative, ‘Pay Me Not to Speak Your Weight’ machine was  a much better idea but for some reason it never took off…

Nevertheless, despite this and other reservations (forgive the pun), the concept has on the whole been greeted favourably, though not necessarily because it’s actually a good idea or anything. One reason it’s been received with interest is that no one ever seems to mind it when overweight people are held accountable for their perceived failures – or even demeaned because of them (though that would properly be the subject of a whole different column).

Another is that hardly anyone has been able to resist wondering, with a sort of horrified fascination, how this practice might work out if Ryanair were to adopt it.

How might it be policed? Would you be railroaded out of the queue for check-in and asked to squeeze yourself into a metal cage, to see if you fit?

Would you be constantly being sized up by shrill Ryanair flight attendants, who are themselves so compact that they could be comfortably stowed in twos and threes in the overhead lockers (which would probably make for a pleasanter flight for everyone on board, but I digress).

In considering this, it must be borne in mind that men will, generally speaking, be worth more to airlines than women, which will surely cause trouble, while fat people will be worth more than anyone else.

Chris Langton didn’t mention the fact that Samoa is the fourth-most obese country in the world, according to the World Health Organisation, so Samoa Air probably isn’t running the risk of having planeloads of skinny malinks running the company into bankruptcy.

Take a Lilliputian creature such as Tom Cruise, for instance. An airline charging by weight would practically have to pay him to fly (except in so far as he adds value by transporting various thick-set Scientology types around with him at all times).

And skinny people generally will represent very poor value to a cost-conscious airline. After all, it takes a lot of effort to stay fashionably thin. A great deal of nice chow must be sacrificed. That sacrifice is often balanced by a lot of shopping for a lot of nice clothes that show your skeleton to its best advantage. What you save on carbohydrates you spend on Karl Lagerfeld.

Consequently, thin people tend to pack almost everything they look cute in, using up the entirety of their luggage allowance, rounded down to the nearest nanogram. Then they sit through the entire flight, with their hands dangling abstemiously in the gaps between their bony thighs, saying no to all the beer and hotdogs.

Fat people, by contrast, can never find anything to fit them, so they travel light, thus reducing the aircraft’s payload despite having paid more than anyone else for their tickets. And of course they famously can’t go more than ninety minutes without a snack, so even short-haul airlines get to offload their entire stockpile of money-making meatball subs before they expire (though in truth, a meatball sub doesn’t so much have an expiry date as a half-life).

In view of this, Ryanair would have to think up inventive ways to lure the more profitable obese travellers on board its flights. You dread to imagine what meretricious advertising the airline might employ to do this. Just how low might it stoop? You dread it, and yet you cannot help wanting to see it.

 

Published in the Irish Mail on Sunday, 7th April 2013

Mayo speaks its mind

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patrick

 

TENTATIVE plans to erect a 100-foot statue of St Patrick on top of the patron saint’s sacred mountain have had to be dropped. To put it delicately, Mayo said no.

A Canadian sculptor inauspiciously named Timothy Schmalz was behind the idea. He compared it to the Statue of Liberty, and claimed it would have attracted millions of tourists every year at a cost of only €10m.

Schmalz planned to depict St Patrick in a sort of action hero pose, with one arm aloft and pointing aggressively at a shamrock, while four serpent-like creatures writhe cartoonishly at his feet.

Local paper the Mayo News took the liberty of canvassing Mayo’s opinion of the statue. To paraphrase the people of Mayo: “We’re deeply obliged to you but we must respectfully and regretfully decline your offer.” To quote the people of Mayo accurately: “Feck off for yourself with your 100-foot statue. Go on. Go on. Feck off out of that.”

Thank you, people of Mayo, for making your feelings so plain. If only we’d all been given the chance to be so forthright on the subject of public art, there wouldn’t be half so many revolting sculptures thrown up in town centres all over the country.

 

Published in the Irish Mail on Sunday, 31 March 2013

Silent majority… very silent indeed

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taoiseach & helen mcentee

IN a death-defying leap of logic, Taoiseach Enda Kenny has said Helen McEntee’s by-election win in Meath East proves there is a “silent majority” that backs Fine Gael in Government.

“There is a big silent majority here in Co Meath which voted for what is being put out in front of them and that’s the truth,” Kenny was quoted as saying. Then, finding himself suddenly marooned in the middle of his own sentence, he panicked and added, in a bewildering non sequitur: “there is no alternative to the truth and in that sense, by-elections are always worse to adjudicate on beforehand…”

Admittedly, the taoiseach could hardly call this result what it was – a victory for human sympathy – but still… Let’s have a closer look at that silent majority of his.

Helen McEntee was elected with 11,473 votes, of which 9,356 were first-preference votes. The total electorate in Meath East consists of 64,164 people, but there’s no getting around the conspicuous problem that only 38% of those people expressed any preference at all in this election.

This means that McEntee was the first-choice candidate of slightly under 15% of the electors of Meath East. She won, therefore, because the runner-up, Fianna Fáil’s Thomas Byrne, was the first choice of only 12.5% of electors. She didn’t even reach the quota.

That’s our exemplary democratic process at work, there. Certainly, there’s a silent majority in it somewhere, but it doesn’t seem to be made up of people who voted Fine Gael.

 

Published in the Irish Mail on Sunday, 31 March 2013

Ferry tale

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affair1

Deborah Kerr and Cary Grant in ‘An Affair to Remember’

 

WHAT a wasted opportunity it was, not getting stuck on that Irish Ferries ship that was stranded at sea for 48 hours on the way to Cherbourg this week.

The reason is that last year I bought the Rolls Royce of travel insurance policies for a princely €40. It covers me against accidents, acts of god, ash clouds, absent-mindedness, you name it. And I haven’t got any value out of it.

This is the sort of insurance policy that can even make a virtue out of a person’s shortcomings. If an item of luggage is delayed in arrival – delayed, mind, not even lost – I stand to gain €450, even though I’m too mean to spend money on clothes and hence can double the value of my entire outfit simply by putting a box of matches in my pocket.

Other personal failings are similarly rewarded. For instance, if my wanton unpunctuality causes me to miss my flight, am I obliged to trudge home in a sorry fashion, thinking about all the fun I’m not having? No, I am not. I am urged to sashay home and put in a claim for €1,000.

And what if, owing to my chronic reluctance to commit myself to a plan – any plan – and stick to it, I simply change my mind about travelling? Am I punished for my caprice? No, I am not punished. I am compensated, to the tune of up to €7,000.

Having never been knowingly overinsured before, I was really hoping to get the full use out of this. Instead, things have all gone swimmingly. Everything took off when it was supposed to; volcanoes remained stubbornly dormant; I didn’t break any bones while skiing (though I have only myself to blame for that, having neglected to ski); not a stitch of my impressive collection of outmoded polyester ended up in Abu Dhabi by mistake; because I travelled with people who still think you have to be at the airport two hours before, even when you’ve checked in online, I didn’t miss a single flight (though a certain amount of unpleasantness while we waited two sodding hours for the gate to open was unavoidable). And I flew Aeroflot, time and time again, without so much as a near-miss to show for it.

Now my beautiful insurance policy expires tomorrow, and won’t have benefited me in the slightest, not least because I wasn’t on that ferry. Worst €40 I ever spent.

The unlucky ship, the Oscar Wilde, left Rosslare last Sunday and was stuck outside Cherbourg because of the weather; when it finally docked on Wednesday, they couldn’t get the door open, so everyone was stranded on board for several more hours, gazing at that tent of blue which passengers call the sky, to paraphrase Oscar.

Only think of the cancelled hotel rooms I might have claimed for; the loss of my priceless mystery documents that got blown overboard; the ruination of my plan to spend a fortnight glamorously swanning around the Riviera in my manmade fabrics.

Having said that, it would take some effort to compensate a person for being stuck aboard a ferry. There are, of course, people who swear by ferries, but only because they’re too damn yellow to fly. So they pretend to enjoy the shrieking children, the stink of puke and chips, the tootle and flare of slot machines, and the society of a gang of merrymakers from Liverpool who are somehow still having a great time even though they’ve been drinking Carlsberg Special Brew for 24 solid hours and ought to have passed out long since instead of tirelessly trying to rope you into a singsong.

This isn’t what boat travel should be about. Boat travel should be about being Bette Davis in the second half of Now, Voyager. You begin as a frumpy middle-aged woman and by the time you’ve finished your cruise, you’ve lost ten years and ten kilos, while gaining the admiration of Paul Henreid and the ability to rock a hat.

Or better yet, you’re Deborah Kerr in An Affair to Remember. You manage to charm Cary Grant aboard a transatlantic liner, even though he’s a notorious dilettante and you’re a shade on the prim side, let’s be truthful. What a bit of luck. Then you meet his grandmother and the two of you get along famously. Things couldn’t be going better. Sure enough, you fall madly, hopelessly, teddibly in love.

Admittedly, for this ferry story to reach its happy-ever-after, you have to be hit by a car on your way to an assignation in the Empire State Building and end up in a wheelchair. But anything is possible: if he can paint, you can walk. And anyway, think of the insurance payout.

 

Published in the Irish Mail on Sunday, 17th March 2013 

Bedsitland and a soft sell

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“An area developed for golf enthusiasts”?

 

THIS week we found out how both of the other halves live. The poor half are living in squalor on Dublin’s northside, while the rich half are enjoying a life of comfortable bankruptcy in England. The rest of us are somewhere in between, puzzling over our fractions.

The squalor has been found on Dublin’s North Circular Road, the heart of what used to be known as Bedsitland before bedsits were outlawed last month, solving one problem and creating another for reasons that really aren’t all that clear.

Environmental health officers from the city council inspected 589 privately-owned flats and found that 483 of them left too much to be desired by way of safety and comfort. They lack proper sanitation, they’re damp, they’re inadequately heated, they don’t have hot and cold running water, and their gas and electrical appliances are not properly maintained.

The landlords have been given a year to set their houses in order, which means the tenants have also been granted another year amid the cold and the mould and the potent reek of butane and lovelessness.

So much for the wretched inhabitants of the North Circular. The very same day that we found out about the living conditions of those misused men (and they might not be mostly men, but it seems likely), we also got a gratuitous gawk at the former home of a former boy from the former boy band, Westlife.

In 2004, Shane Filan built a massive, 10,000-square-foot McMansion in County Sligo at a reported cost of some €4 million, providing clear proof at the time that, from a financial perspective at least, if not an aesthetic one, you can do a lot worse than flogging vestal pop to pre-teens.

Then Filan immersed himself in property, and ended up €23 million underwater. So last year he was obliged to depart his homeland for the more clement insolvency regime across the Irish Sea, where he now lives in a house in Surrey worth a piffling €2.5m.

The estate agent’s listing for ‘Castledale’, as the Sligo house is known, includes an exhaustive description and 30 photographs for nosy parkers to pore over while mulling deep philosophical questions about what the life you didn’t live might have been like had you lived it.

Shane Filan’s house is set on four-and-three-quarter acres including a “small lake”. It has five bedrooms and six bathrooms and a bar and a gym and a studio and a three-car garage. So far so unlike anyone else’s house.

It also has a “piano area”, and… wait, hang on. If you’ve got a piano, then you’ve got a “piano area”, don’t you? Your piano must inhabit an area of floor, surely, unless you’ve suspended it from the ceiling for some idiotic reason of your own, or you’re just pretending to have a piano, or it’s made of anti-matter (and if your piano answers any of these three descriptions, please stop reading now and go and talk things over with someone you can trust).

‘Castledale’ also has a “cinema room” instead of a cinema, and a “nursery room” instead of a nursery, and a “gym facility” rather than a gym. It has a “sunroom area”, not a sunroom. You begin to get the picture. So if you’ve got a piano and you’ve never thought of calling it a “piano area”, well, that’s because you’re not an estate agent and you’ll never be an estate agent. You don’t have what it takes to be an estate agent. Now put that coffee down. Coffee is for closers.

Another interesting feature of ‘Castledale’ is that it has what’s called “an area developed for golf enthusiasts”. The agents don’t explain what that means but we can take a guess it probably entails a gin-tonic fountain, a wardrobe full of God-awful clothes, and a microphone, for all those faux-humble speeches.

The house has been stripped of furniture, so we don’t get to mock the previous inhabitants’ taste, more’s the pity. It’s not like Graceland, where visitors laugh superciliously at Elvis’s shag pile, while the voice of Elvis is heard protesting crossly from beyond the grave: “Jeez, everyone had it then! Is it my fault Priscilla hasn’t redecorated?”

‘Castledale’ is on the market for €990,000, or less than a quarter of its reputed build cost. But there’s a fierce bang of Westlife off the place. If those walls could talk… they’d croon breathily: “Take a look at me nooooow, there’s just an empty space.” Plus there must be a strong possibility that Brian McFadden relieved himself in any or all of the six toilets. Caveat emptor and all that. But if it’s sanitation and heat you’re after, it’s a better bet than the North Circular Road.

 

Published in the Irish Mail on Sunday, 3 March 2013