Ole!

So I eventually found my way, against all likelihood, back to Spain for a second time. Although destinacion ultima is the Andalucian gemstone that is Granada, I have to travel there by first landing in Malaga. Now, being somewhat light of pocket, these last two times I've decided to suppress my bourgeois affectations for things like light, space and oxygen and opt for Ryanair. Having sampled Greyhound in America, I'm somewhat familiar with the 'fight tooth and nail with every man, woman and child' approach you generally have to take.

This time, after assuring the baggage woman that I hadn't forgetfully left my acid-spurting anthrax firework in my luggage, I eventually made it on and to a window seat without much en-route skull-crushing needed. I did actually think that, being February and all, there might be less people than usual clamouring for the marginally-less-freezing shores of Malaga. Needless to say though, with Ryanair being the last-ditch refuge of all of the UK's desperate, fleeing emigres that it is, it was packed as a bastard.

I then had the pleasure of sharing a flight with the curious combo of an imperious, snowy bearded Count Dooku of Tunbridge Wells and his wife, who just seemed to stare vacantly, intermittently affirming his haughty diatribes with fragmented english, giving me a mouthful of greasy afro every time she answered in the negatory. I'm guessing she was some variant of bargain basement mail-order bride. Once the air hostess had finished her ritual flying dance with the oxygen mask and the lifejacket, it seemed to act as some bizarre aphrodisiac to them both, my nose descending further into my Roth novel in wilful denial of the orgiastic kneading, kissing and chafing of wrinkles going on next to me. Also, he may or may not have asked her to call him daddy.

What also interests me is that the disembodied 'voice of Ryanair' that spills out occasionally to tell us either to love them and that War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery etc is always either chirpily Irish or disrmingly Scottish. Which is all well and good, and admittedly a welcome refrain from the constant, icy tone of RP English forced upon us daily, but I suspect people just like being told things by an accent that hasn't invaded them in recent centuries.