Living the high life

The journey and not the arrival matters”, said the English poet T.S. Eliot, who would have turned in his grave at the sight of most modern travel. Gone are his early twentieth-century rail odysseys aboard the Orient Express, complete with gourmet cuisine, bow-tied porters and more excess baggage than a triple divorcee with seven kids and a criminal record. We don’t even have Concorde any more, because ultra-luxurious supersonic jets couldn’t find enough rich punters to make them profitable. Instead, things have gone to pot. These days we book our flights online, get herded onto a plane like lemmings and then crammed into seats with legroom designed for a stunted child-dwarf. And after all that, some airlines even have the cheek to charge us for everything from a glass of water to an extra kilo of luggage. Airborne lounge A gloomy state of affairs, then, but sometimes it’s worth reminding