Below the Belt

It’s bad enough having to pay extra for a seat that comes nowhere near big enough for a man of my size, and it’s humiliating enough trying to fit my butt and gut into the little square padded bucket they call a Hot Seat. But when you have to use the dreaded Air Asia Seat Belt Extension (Mark III), then you know that something has gone drastically wrong somewhere....

Luckily, when I went on a conference trip to KL last week in one of those sparky red Air Asia A 320s, I just managed to avoid having to ask the flight attendant That Embarrassing Little Question that goes something like ‘excuse me, can I please borrow the extension?”

But only just. You can imagine me, squeezing myself into my ‘hot seat’ at the front of the plane (RM 25 extra for the privilege of suffering marginally less thrombosis and crushed diaphragm), with a grandstand view of the shaved grey hair on the back of the Captain’s neck, thinking ‘I bet he doesn’t have this trouble...’

Once I am inside my new Hot Seat, I think of what it must have been like for the brave fighter pilots of World War Two. Did they always manage to fit into their tiny little seats in the cockpits of their dashing Spitfires, or furious Messerschmidts, or did they sometimes experience a little bit of pushmepullyou whenever they had consumed too much rice pudding in the Mess? I suppose it would have been Bratwurst for the Germans, but...

Anyway, anyway...

Back to the present - there was me tightly ensconced in my Air Asia seat and optimistically pulling the existing red seat belt to its furthest extent to see if it will accommodate my gut. Now at this point, usually one of two things are bound to happen. Either the chasmic gulf between belt and buckle is so uncrossable that one just has to say those magic words to the flight attendant, one of which rhymes with ‘pension’.

The alternative, the oh so happy alternative, is that the buckle and the belt meet together as effortlessly as train carriages at a siding. Just like they do on Malaysian Airlines planes, I’ve noticed, but that’s another story....

But last week, I navigated a middle course between these two points. I discovered that, with considerable contortions of my stomach and my face, and a lot of holding of breath, I could actually get the seat belt to fasten properly and safely. But in order to do it, I had to wrap the belt buckle round my gut to meet the fastener which seemed to be buried somewhere deep inside the left hand side of my seat.

The strain of doing this (with one hand) was akin to that experienced doing handstands in a toilet cubicle, and I had to manoeuvre the belt so that it only covered my lower stomach near to my lap.

But I tell you, the ecstasy of eating a 150 g bar of Cadburys Dairy Milk in one go is nothing, NOTHING in comparison to the sheer exhilaration and sense of triumph and joy that I experienced when I finally felt the belt buckle emit that utterly satisfying metallic ‘clunk’ that signified Victory!

Ah, such sweet sweet pleasures.....