Hold tight

You’ll have to bear with me – I’ve got a bear with me. His name is Bill. He’s in the hold. He’s not a real bear – that would be cruel. But I am thinking of him now. I like to have him with me in times of stress. He would have been with me, here in this warm cabin, except that his eyes are held in with steel pins and they would have bleeped going through the detector. I know this because I tried it on a previous occasion and Bill was impounded (it was either that or remove his eyes, which I could not bring myself to do). When I remonstrated with the official he said the pins could be used in an attack on the captain of the airliner.
So, Bill lies there in the cold, cold hold!

Oh, and I am afraid I have been telling lies again (not about Bill). Sydney really is my son – the DNA test was done, some time ago. Another ‘white’ lie concerns my friend Hector the trolley dolly. Actually Hector is my brother – as those who have been following the story closely will know. He really was a trolley dolly though. He packed it in because of his legs: he was getting varicose veins, or those very close veins as he called them.

He applied to train as a pilot but they turned him down – on account of the maths: he just didn’t have the mathematical ability required of a captain of airliners. I hope this fellow has the maths. Of course it’s all done by computers now. Somebody told me they don’t really need humans on the flight deck – a computer could do the job. Better. But the reason they have real people is to calm the fears of the passengers: they wouldn’t trust a computer.
Well, you can count me in that lot, I told him. I would much rather be in a crash that was due to ‘human error’ than one, which was down to ‘computer error’. Call me old-fashioned, but there it is.

I wanted to get those lies off my chest, just in case anything… you know… went wrong. I can see the runway lights now. I wish old Bill were with me.