Episode 02 - Fear of Flying

This month I have been to Croatia, Botswana, Dubai (x3), Oman, Zimbabwe and South Africa. It is the twentieth. There are ten days left. There is, in principle, still time for more. I will visit Montenegro, Albania and Kosovo before the month ends, and perhaps back to the Middle East again.

I list them not to impress — the frequent-flyer tier does that, and it does it coldly — but to make a confession that undercuts the whole enterprise: I am, and have always been, more or less terrified of flying.

I remain fearful. Not in a way that stops me. In a way that simply accompanies me, everywhere, like a nervous junior. I have read the safety card in six languages. I know which sounds the aircraft makes on purpose and which ones I have decided, without evidence, are new. I grip the armrest during turbulence with the quiet dignity of a man who believes, sincerely, that he is holding the plane up himself. Somewhere over the Indian Ocean, en route to Madagascar, I performed this service for several hours and received no thanks.

This makes me, I have concluded, the Dennis Bergkamp of international lawyers — with the crucial difference that Bergkamp had the good sense to build a career he could largely do by coach. He looked at flying, decided against it, and won trophies from the ground. I looked at flying, felt precisely the same way, and then chose the one profession on earth that consists of almost nothing else. One of us is a genius. It is not the one typing this.

People imagine the international practitioner striding through terminals, unbothered, a citizen of everywhere. The reality, in my case, is a grown man in a creased suit doing discreet breathing (Chi Gung) exercises during boarding, who has been to more countries than he can comfortably name and enjoyed the airborne portion of precisely none of them. The work I love. The commute I endure. And the commute, inconveniently, is most of the job.

Ironically, I'm writing this week from a beach in Croatia, having spent the day flying as a tourist — on an airline I rarely use, for reasons that became apparent to my long-suffering family somewhere over the Adriatic.

Back at the airport now. There is a lesson in here somewhere about doing the thing that frightens you, but I am too tired to locate it, and my gate has just changed to one that is, on the evidence of the departures board, in a different country.

More next week — conditions, and my nerves, permitting.