My left sock:

Everyone says they hate to fly. Perhaps it is just something that has become too passé to enjoy:

‘Oh God the food, they kept trying to flog me Richard Branson’s autobiography, yada yada yada.’

Secretly we love it. When you take off one hundred million tones of big bulky metal, dangerously over laden with obnoxious tourists and the obligatory screaming baby strains, screams and shudders to finally wrench itself into the air. And when you get over the ‘this is not going to work and we are all going to die’ stage you sit back and the smug part of you wants to tell gravity to go jump in a lake.

But think of the knickers.

Down in the bowels of the plane are all the hideous clothes belonging to the hideous tourists. Just think of how many pairs of knickers must be circling the globe as we speak. There are 300 people on this plane. And that is not counting those who like to live fast and free. So there are a whole lot of knickers on this plane.

Yeah, sure… I am wearing a pair, but there are another five or so pairs of my knickers somewhere on this plane.

If we crashed now my knickers could very well be my legacy. I may be mashed up into a bloody unrecognizable pulp, but my knickers could be found hanging on a tree somewhere. A testament to the fact that I shop at Target. That is what they said about the Lockerbie plane crash. Clothes were found hanging from trees for miles around.

I am sitting here eating my inedible and incredibly expensive plastic sandwich (and making Richard even more rich by doing it – you would think the bastards could spring for a decent airline). I am staring at Amanda’s laptop. She’s probably working on another way to screw single mothers. But if we crash that laptop is going to hit the ground at one hundred miles an hour and be electronic pâté, but her dirty undies will burst from her suitcase, catch an updraft and float down to earth like proverbial snowflakes.

It is the little things you leave behind that make life special isn’t it.