Episode 10 - The Armrest Convention

I have told you which way I turn. I have not told you what happens on the occasions when I cannot.

Turning left on the short European routes is a gentler fraud than the long-haul version. There is no flat bed and no printed menu (well there was a printed menu as such today on my flight but it was a choice of vegetarian or non-vegetarian). There is the same seat as everyone else’s, a curtain, a slightly warmer bread roll, and an empty seat in the middle. That empty seat is the whole product. You are not paying for comfort. You are paying for a buffer zone.

But there are flights where the front is full, or there is no front, or the booking has been made by someone who has never met me, and I find myself back where I started, turning right, holding a boarding pass for 23B.

The middle seat comes with two armrests and no settled claim to either.

I have spent a career in public international law, and I can tell you that the middle armrest is the most contested territory in the world that no tribunal has ever been asked to decide. There is no treaty. There is barely any custom, because custom requires consistent practice and a sense of legal obligation, and on a budget flight to Tirana, Prishtina or Sarajevo, there is neither.

What there is, is effective occupation. Title to territory can follow from the continuous and peaceful display of authority over it. On an aircraft, that authority is an elbow. Whoever gets one down first, and keeps it there without visible protest, acquires title. The man in 23C understands this as well as Max Huber did in the Island of Palmas award, and he has never read a word of it. He simply boarded before me.

I have tried every remedy. The silent counter-claim, in which you place your elbow on the remaining two centimetres and hold it there, rigid, for three hours, like a man in a stress position. The diplomatic note, which is a small cough. The appeal to a higher authority, which is the cabin crew, who regard the dispute as non-justiciable and bring you a lukewarm tea.

Nothing works. The armrest belongs to the elbow that got there first. It is the only area of law in which I am consistently on the losing (and highly irritable) side.

The armrest is only the frontier. Behind it lies the full catalogue of the man in the next seat, and over twenty years I believe I have met every edition.

There is the recliner, who waits until the meal arrives and then lies back into your lap with the confidence of a man exercising an absolute right. There is the one who takes his shoes off before take-off, as though the aircraft were his sitting room and I a guest he had not quite invited. There is, inevitably, the eater, who has brought his own food on board, and it is always something that crunches. I described him in Episode 7. He has not changed his habits on my account.

And then there is the conversationalist, the most dangerous of them all, because eventually he will ask what I do.

I have learned to lie. Not well, and not consistently, but I have learned. The truth produces the same result every time. A barrister, he says, delighted, and settles in. He has a problem. It is always a boundary. A fence, a hedge, a neighbour who has moved a post eighteen inches in the night. He would like to know his chances. I would like to point out that I am at that very moment conducting a boundary dispute of my own, with him, over the armrest, and losing.

Instead I give the advice. It is free, it is sound, and he will not take it. He then asks what I think about the ICC, and the remaining two hours are gone.

The patron saint of the man in the next seat is Del Griffith, John Candy’s shower curtain ring salesman in Planes, Trains and Automobiles. He is kind, he is relentless, he will not stop talking, and when they are forced to share a motel bed he takes considerably more than his half. The great joke of the film is that Steve Martin, after two days of suffering, discovers that he loves him. I have watched it many times. It has never once happened to me at thirty thousand feet.

Which brings me, by an indirect route, to the London Conference on International Law.

It is the sort of gathering where the profession assembles to discuss the great questions: the use of force, the future of the international courts, whether the system we have spent our working lives inside will still be standing by the end of the decade. It is also, between sessions, a long room full of coffee and pastries, which for a man of my condition is a live-fire exercise with name badges.

The highlight was the dinner.  Walking up the grandiose, red carpeted steps in the Grand Hall, a senior colleague came over. Someone whose work I have read for years and whose name you would recognise, which is precisely why you are not getting it. He commended me on something I had written. I had naively assumed it was a profound and intellectually stimulating piece on the future of the ICC, the complexities and political uncertainty of a peaceful resolution to the conflicts in Ukraine, Palestine or Iran.  It was not.  He said he had been reading these pieces. He said he had enjoyed them.

I braced myself. I assumed I was about to be engaged on the substance. The fragility of the institutions, perhaps, or the strange intimacy of the non-place, or the ethics of writing comically about a life spent among atrocity cases. I had answers ready. I had, if I am honest, been rehearsing them for some weeks against exactly this eventuality.

He wanted to talk about the crunching, about chewing and about people eating noisily in public .

It turns out he has it too. The same wiring, the same lever, the same rage at a stranger working through a packet of crisps. He had read Episode 7, recognised himself in it, and crossed a room full of the most distinguished international lawyers in the country to tell me so. We stood in a corner, two grown men of some professional standing, and agreed with tremendous enthusiasm that it was a great relief to discover the thing had a name. Misophonia. I am not certain either of us could reliably spell it. Both of us were delighted it existed.

It was the most intellectually satisfying conversation I had all day.

I am not able to identify him. Professional courtesy, and a reasonable fear of retaliation, prevent it. I will say only this. Apples: are you eating or drinking that? He will know who he is.

I have thought about him since, mostly on aircraft. He is, I have realised, the only person I would choose to sit next to. We would not speak. Neither of us would bring food. Neither of us would recline. We would look straight ahead, in perfect mutual silence, for the full duration of the flight.

I would even let him have the armrest.

That is not a concession I have made to anyone in twenty years of flying, and I would like it recorded that it was made voluntarily, without prejudice, and in recognition of a shared condition. It may be the only agreement concluded at the London Conference on International Law that both parties fully intend to honour.

They’re boarding. 23B, apparently. More from the next one.