Drowned In Their Own Saliva

I googled the catchy phrase above, to see if there were any recorded cases. (My 45 second “research” is inconclusive and not enough to stop a blob... but it is not looking terribly likely.)

It does appear there are a lot of people who can give themselves a coughing fit by breathing their own saliva, but that’s old news. I’ve been able to do that for years. In fact, it’s contagious. The first time I did it in front of Emergency Contact, she thought I was a complete weirdo. But on learning that it could happen, she took it up with gusto.

The reason I’m out on the pointy end of science like this?

I’ve had a throat infection for the last few days and I’ve given up swallowing. At the same time, my salivary glands took this as a que to really put in. The phrase, ‘Produce enough saliva to drown a man with acute pharyngitis’ is unlikely to replace ‘to cut one’s nose off to spite their face’ in the short term, but I want it considered for down the track.

Over the last three nights, I've woken up every 30 seconds. I was either choking, drowning, or just being disturbed by the pain of swallowing.

I’ve had enough, I tells ya!

Actually, that’s why you’re getting a blob about it. I can’t tell you anything. It’s also driven me mute.

Emergency Contact thinks it’s brilliant.

Don’t Make A Spectacle Of Yourself

It may interest you to know that we in Australia cannot have 20-20 hindsight, foresight or even a 20-20 plebiscite. Not because we’re stupid; because we’re metric. It’s not measured over 20 feet, but 6 meters. Doesn’t that ruin some song lyrics?

Last week, I found myself at the optometrist. It wasn’t an accidental thing, like wandering around with my arms out and lucking on the right door, but it did have the feeling of coming on suddenly, and without my permission. Apparently, this happens precisely at a point when you hit your very, very (extremely) late twenties.

So, we do the testing and it turns out that, beyond a certain distance, I have better than nominal sight. I get 6.5 out of 6. In semi-practical terms, this means you can move the contract 7 metres away from me and I can still read the fine-print. But it’s inside that distance that led me to the optometrist in the first place.

After the test (and the distinctly odd experience of having my eyeballs anaesthetised and the Optometrist rest a piece of equipment on them to measure their pressure) I received her quirky analysis and prescription.

“As you age, the eye muscles are less able to refocus the lens for the close in, reading-type activities. You can buy standard, non-prescription glasses from the service station and it won’t harm you and it won’t change the strength of the prescription that you will eventually need. But if you can muddle through, you might as well…”

And then she said the thing that tickled me.

“… and you might as well muddle through, because you’re tall.”

“Oh, and why does that matter?” I ask. I just don’t see the connection.

“Because you can hold the book a long way away from yourself, and it won’t look too odd.”

Bugle Quintets Prohibited

In Training

I will be talked about in China for years to come. I’m surprised there’s not already a Wikipedia page dedicated to my achievements.

First, I got a nickname. It’s 'One Per Basket'. Which inevitably got shortened to 'One Basket'.

I like it. It sounds philosophical, or maybe to do with a mental illness. As in,

“Hey, what’s wrong with him?”

“Oh, him. He’s only shopping with one basket.”

It came about totally logically. We were about to go hot-air-ballooning, and the head pilot (?) was dividing us up into groups, for the balloons. Everybody got the same number of people in their basket, except my group. He indicated that because I was a big round-eye, I was worth two people in a basket. Much hilarity and the name is born.

My second big achievement this week was a relativistic one.

Shanghai has a maglev train. It’s a monorail type arrangement that levitates the train magnetically. This means it can go quite fast. When I say “quite fast” I mean faster than Veyron. Faster than bullet trains. I mean doing the Kessle run in 7-and-a-half minutes. It's fast enough for you old round-eye.

“How fast, One Basket?” I hear you ask. Well, it routinely shuffles between downtown Shanghai and the airport at a 441 km/h. When you are doing 441 km/h alongside an expressway (where you know the cars are doing somewhere between 100 and 130) you get a real feeling for how unbelievably quick that is.

They’re just standing still.

The blurred image, above, is me trying to hold steady enough to get a photo of the speed read-out in the carriage. There is so much vibration from the air, I just couldn‘t get a still shot. When the maglev going in the opposite direction passed, I almost had a heart-attack. They have a combined closing speed of 900 km/h (that’s very nearly the speed of sound) so you don’t see it coming. There’s just a huge bang with the air-pressure change and all the windows move in and out and that’s it. You don’t get to see it. You just hear the bang.

So, I’m on the maglev - and it gets to 442 km/h. A tiny bit faster than normal (they’ve actually trialled it at over 500 kph, so it was really only just starting to stretch its mags) and I take the opportunity by the horns. I go down to the back of the train and run up to the front.

I estimate that I have now run at 452 kph.

A new PB for One Basket!

All Roads Lead To Pollution

If Rene Descartes was to appear before me, I’d kick him in the epistemologies, point at China, and say, “Solipsism hey!? What do you think of them apples?”

You can’t make this place up. The human mind is not up to it. If it’s not the numbers, size and variation, it’s the freakin’ driving. I will never get used to it. I’ve spent too long driving in places that have rules. I have acclimatised to being on the wrong side, but that’s because it’s the least of my worries. And really, that whole, “We drive on this side. You going the other way, drive on that side…” is only the vaguest guideline. Sort of like a serving suggestion.

China has properly started its love affair with the car. Fifteen years ago there were almost no privately owned cars. This year, Chinese citizens bought more cars than Americans.

Sure, there are a billion more Chinese than Americans, but that just means the manufacturers have only just scratched the surface of the market. I’d be surprised if we didn’t see that number trumped, again and again.

There will be a couple of factors that will eventually inhibit continual growth in the car market; one of them being the natural limit to how many cars can fit on the roads.

If you arrive in Shanghai from one of the many freeways, you slam to a quick halt in the face of the most amazing traffic. Fifteen hundred new cars hit Shanghai streets every day. If that sounds like a lot, Shanghai’s registered population is nearly 14 million. But that doesn’t really tell the story. That number is boosted by unregistered people and those who live outside the municipality and come in to work. It’s guessed to be over 20 million. Let’s put that into some perspective. That’s the population of Australia in a city you can drive across before lunch.

Yet, in strange contrast, there is no shortage of roads in China. It just depends where you are. They have built roads all over the country in preparation for the traffic increase. It’s possible to be belting along nearly empty expressways between quite large population centres. There are flyovers and cloverleaf exits that would make a Texan proud.

Some other transport facts stand out. Mainly because you almost get killed by them several times a day. The Chinese have gone for electric scooters. I saw one for sale in our local hardware in Australia last year and thought it was interesting enough to prompt a blob. I’ve not seen one since (in Australia) and that's because the Chinese bought them all.

Here, they are a swarming, ubiquitous, inescapable presence. A good proportion of the population in big cities have given up pedalling and scoot around on these funky, totally silent, electric bikes. The state owned Flying Pigeon bike manufacturer has had to consider outsourcing to SE Asia and Africa to cut costs because they used to sell over 4 million bikes a year. Now, it’s down to just over a million. I like the look of them, but they do weigh over twenty kilos (partly because of the reinforced crossbar for carrying pigs) and are not considered fashionable.

There’s also an industry that adds motors and batteries to the hundred-year-old tricycles. These are the things with the tray on the back. All the farmers seem to get around on them (silently) carrying enormous loads that will squash you flat as you step off the curb.

Facts and figures used here have been checked against National Geo, The Age and various 'pedias, to put some substance around the type of conversations you have on a bus - when you're going through a town like Shanghai. Besides, if you're reading AGA for factual accounting of the world...

One China

Broad And Pointless Target

There are plenty of sites that have "Chingrish" signs as part of their content.

I started snapping away being amused at first, and then just gave up. They are everywhere. There's just no point.

And when I say, "there's just no point", there really isn't. The Chinese don't care. There's a chain of coffee shops, called Coffee and Cate. They're at big international airports. No-one cares - and when 1.3 Billion people don't care, that pretty much seals the deal.

So get used to it, round-eye. They take a crack at our language sometimes, don't seem to check with a native English speaker if it's remotely correct, and usually make a hash of it.

But we should just be thankful they even put in the effort they do. They don't really have to and as far as the rise of the country is concerned, well, English is doomed.

Terracotta Bus Driver

Nobody Underchans Me

Is it possible to be blinded by over-exposure to the awesomeness that is Jackie Chan?

I knew the guy was popular in China, but what I couldn't have predicted is just how much he gets around. He must hire lookalikes just to get through a day's work.

He plugs cameras, which is not so silly. He makes films. And cars. Not so silly; he presumably drives. Then there's Jackie Chan's Anti Dandruff Shampoo - a bit silly. (Or maybe he's bravely overcome an embarrassing scalp condition.)

That's just the stuff I can wring meaning out of. There are bundles more examples where he gives the Chan imprimatur to an esoteric collection of goodies, ranging from life insurance (plugged by a man who falls on his head for a living) to all sorts of other plugging. I'm pretty sure he's even given the thumb up to constipation. Or at least the medicine.

But what really made me think that JC had started to believe he could also walk on water, was when I turned on Chinese MTV and saw him in the top-twenty countdown. He was singing a romantic little ballad alongside a girl a third of his age. We then cut to ads where he endorses a credit card.

I used to like Jackie because he didn't take himself too seriously. But the parody has become a monster and it's eating itself. His involvement in pop-music does offer me an excuse to wander into an aesthetic minefield though.

I'll probably end up on a blacklist somewhere for saying this (at least corrected) but as far as I can tell, China has no pop-music that sounds Chinese. Certainly none being broadcast on TV. Maybe some things are just universally catchy, and some things aren't. Perhaps you can't modify a traditional Chinese musical style in a way that'll get you tapping your toes at the traffic lights.

The West's pop-music comes from its traditional music in a pretty straight line. The structure, the time-signatures and the harmonies don't stray too far from the baroque. From a three hundred year old European salon, they stroll out to a cotton field, or into a Jazz club or Gospel choir and from there, it's just a hip-shake to Elvis. (Even shorter paths sometimes. Take the traditional English song, “Whiskey in a Jar” as interpreted by that classic folk group, Metallica.)

The only difference between China's pop-music and ours is that the words are a bit harder to understand. Oh, and they're two years behind. Every big group of the last five years in the West has an analogue here in China. Nothing in the charts sounds Chinese. It's Euro-pop with Mandarin lyrics. No micro-tones or Chinese time-signatures.

The one concession I've seen (and it's as agreeable as it is contrived) is an all-girl super-group of talented, young musicians who are selling big at the moment*. The job advertisement read “... be conservatory trained in at least three different Chinese instruments. Must be outrageously good looking.”

However, their sound is anything but traditional music. Underneath the yangqin and erhu is drum machine and synthesizer, pushing out perfectly predictable four-four beats. They're Sky in cute outfits.

I've seen a bit of Chinese Opera on TV now, and as far as the theatrical traditions are concerned, it might as well be Gilbert and Sullivan, or worse, panto. There was even a Chinese Bert Newton playing 'that' role. (Any hammier and you could sell it at a deli.) I was sitting there, opening my mind to the new experience and waiting for the musical epiphany of connecting with another modality, but the cat-strangling sounds had the locals clutching their ears and reaching for the remote. They wanted Blitteny Speals.

*I asked a local about the name of the group. He answered, “Ah, yes. That is Black Swan... no, Duck. No. I think again and it is Black Goose." Majestic sounding bird names have suffered in China before. The manufacturer of the archetypal Chinese bicycle had the choice of translating the name of their product to either Flying Dove, or Flying Pigeon. They chose the latter... and after doing some research, the name of the band is 12 Girls Band. Probably to be translated to Dozen Slappers Posse.

Shanghai Ball

If you've ever seen Cirque du Soleil, you'll know what can be achieved using nothing but 12-year-old contortionists and endless training. Apparently those guys poach a lot of their talent from Chinese circuses like the Shanghai Acrobats, who we went to see last night. I almost had an aneurism.

First off, the MC was a gorgeous little SH girl in a flouncy dress who obviously got the job because she told the guys her English was excellent. It was excellent in that she didn't speak for longer than 30 seconds and we understood none of it. Didn't matter. She looked a bundle and had enthusiasm to burn.

Next came The Tumblers of Chaos (or something like that). Followed by the Hula Hoops From Hell. Then the Hat Jugglers of Doom, ably backed up by the Titanic Re-enactment of Insanity. The Bicycle Tumblers of World Economic Downturn followed. Then, The Male Pole Dancer of Certain Testicular Bruising and the Plate Spinners of the Apocalypse. But all these acts (which went for nearly 90 minutes of gut-busting antics) were but a mere lead up to... THE BALL OF DEATH.

Many of you will have seen a “Ball Of Death” act. It's a metallic, mesh sphere with a motorcycle rider inside who gets up enough speed to pin himself to the bike and the bike to the inside of the cage so he can ride it upside-down.

This was that act, taken to the next, China-driving-standard-level-of-certain-destruction.

The first bloke (dressed in red) comes out, belts around a bit inside the cage, builds up enough speed to go north to south - and then takes his hands off the handlebars and crosses his arms. We gasp.

Next guy comes out (fancy yellow and sequins), gets up enough speed and he's doing latitude passes of the globe, while first bloke does longitude passes. All the while communicating their intentions to each other with the ubiquitous Chinese traffic horn. We love it and clap and gasp.

Next bloke comes out (blue with tassles for him) and I turn to Daddy Gag Reflex next to me and say, “I've never seen three at one time.” He giggles and nods. Next bloke joins the internal spherical insanity and they are describing electron paths around a nucleus of madness. Then they all take their hands off the handlebars again and we start screaming.

Next rider comes out. Number four. (He's in flashing green.) DGR is screaming for pedestrians and a shark to be added to the cage, because at this point, anything is possible. We are going mental. Four guys doing about 40 kph in a 20 foot sphere at all angles that can be achieved in a three dimensional space... no hands. It cannot get any better and I start to hyperventilate.

And then... a girl in black leather comes out on a motorcycle and it appears that she wants in. We are screaming. People are throwing their undies. I'm just yelling “On. No. Get. Fucked. You. Cannot. Be. Serious.” But yes she is. In she goes and five nutbags on Shanghai motorbikes are whizzing around inside a globe of fencing wire, looking like a multi-coloured blender of lunacy. I don't know much more I can take, DGR and I laughing so much we can barely see the spectacle through the tears. I'm about to look for a bag to breath into when...

They separate the top and bottom of the Ball of Death from the middle latitudes. There is clear air between the tropics of Capricorn and Cancer. The riders are locked into their paths at whatever position they were in, or risk flying out into the audience. I start to choke with the pure love of it. I cannot be happier. The crowd is out of control and it is clear that we have all witnessed something wonderful.

The four male riders all exit the cage to ovations and only the girl in black leather is left, flying around the inside of the globe like a fly in a bottle. Just when I'm ready to think about an exit and a good lie down, she goes hands free, stands on the pegs, produces a Chinese flag from nowhere and holds it above her head. As she is tying it around her neck like a super-hero cape, the place loses what's left of its control and goes spare. I collapse on the floor in a laughing, applauding pool of protoplasm.

Ten seconds later, it's over. After cleaning ourselves up we exit to look for our transport, and there in the foyer are all the acrobats, still in costume, trying to sell us the DVD of the performance. I felt cheap saying no to Mr Red Costume, someone who's just risked his life to entertain me, but what can you do? Watching it on TV would be a pale imitation and I just can't do it.

The Ball of Death is a 'live' thing.

Feel The Noise

The roads in China are very noisy. There is some provincial variation but in general, the horn is used all the time and has many meanings.

It can mean, “Hello, I'm coming up behind you and will probably go past in a couple of seconds.”

Or, “Hello, I'm riding my completely silent electric scooter at 50 km/h down a four-foot-wide lane-way, crowded with stalls and shoppers.”

Or, “Hello, I am passing your loaded bus on the outside of a blind corner, on the crest of a hill, with sheer drops on either side, into oncoming traffic.”

I have personally experienced all of the above and they are but a small representation of the many and varied meanings of the Chinese horn. Sometimes it's a simpler message. Sometimes it simply means, “Death is imminent.”

Imagine the ideal driver in Australia. Someone who has good control of their vehicle, and has situational awareness at all points of the compass. The internal rear-vision mirror is checked often and the Australian driver will not pass their driving exam without checking the external mirrors and looking over their shoulder before changing lanes.

The ideal Australian driver will not survive here, or will starve before making it home. The approach is – you need only be concerned with what's in front or level with you. Behind you? Well, that is the problem of the person behind you. Lane changes (lanes, what am I talking about? There is a hell of a lot of wasted white paint on the roads here.)... Direction variations are made with impunity and on a whim. The person behind you adjusts or flows around the problem. I mentioned earlier that riding a bike here was alright once you became one of the little fish, and used the current. That's the approach you have to take. You can't get angry at the guy in front for driving like a loon and you yourself can take advantage of this forgiveness when you need to jag out across five lanes of traffic.

I can see how they have gained the reputation they have in other countries. Here, I've seen people stop their cars for a chat in the passing lane of a freeway. But nobody gets upset because it happened in front of them; it's their job to swerve around the impromptu picnic. The blithe lack of concern about anything going on behind their ears works, if everybody does it. It's a disaster in countries that expect orderly flow and predictable braking behaviour.

So if you're committed in some way to a maneuver that involves getting around someone, the horn is used to let them know you're drawing level. It's bloody noisy and this can lead to communication problems when you are on the bus and trying to listen to what people are telling you. For instance, I was quite excited to hear we were off see the Harry Potter Warriors. I've never seen a live game of quidditch and I was all keyed up.

I didn't get to see any quidditch, but the Terracotta Warriors were really very good, too.

Strangers On A Train

As I've always said, you don't know a people until you've shared home-brewed paint-stripper and smoked in the prohibited section between carriages on the overnight train between Chengdu and Xi'an with them.

Nixon didn't do dick while he was here and Kevin Rudd might be able to bang together a couple of sentences to nice public effect, but I have achieved more for international relations than either of those two try-hards, using only a 96 page notebook, an erasable pen and the translation function on a mobile phone. Besides, after a few shots of the rotgut liquor, my Mandarin and their English was flawless. Well... we did all come to some understanding at the very least.

As you and I are routinely told, China is the dragon. It will awake and rule the world. But no-one seems to have told the young Chinese this. The ones I've met and know, here and at home, are all painfully aware of the poverty.

If you lived here, you would be too. I cannot of course speak for the world's largest nation after only seeing chunks of a few provinces, but I can say the following:

One, when you travel through the countryside, it is largely empty. That means most of the people are in the city. Most of those people, it seems, live in appalling little, grey, concrete boxes. These things are depressing hovels. They stretch away in unending drabness and filth in just about every direction you look when you are in a decent sized city, and every city is a decent size. You can arrive in a town you've never heard about that's home to over ten million people. Imagine being able to say that about an American city. The scale of the horror is exciting to witness and I am deeply glad I am not a part of it. Think of the city scenes in either “Brazil” or “Blade Runner” and you only just start to get a feel for it.

Two, the place is in love with plastic. We were in the Chinese equivalent of a roadside diner in the middle of nowhere and all of our crockery was individually wrapped in heat-shrunk plastic after being washed. 1.3 billion people multiplied by three meals a day multiplied by... I can't go on and it's not much more than a small indicator rather than a real figure. But it is the way they are going.

Lastly, I have heard it said that 80% of the world's stuff (produced 'goods' from a factory floor) comes from here. When you see the depth of the smog and the unending mounds of production and waste, it fills me with fear and wonder. China is not just The Sleeping Dragon, it's the belching, farting, crapping and spitting dragon. Nothing this big can writhe around without knocking the other lizards out of bed.

Proof

If you've ever seen the Australian film by the same name, you'll remember that it had something to do with a blind guy who took photos. Well, that's a little like me in China. I am the world's worst photographer. I don't know why. It's sort of like an anti-superpower. Spelling and photography - I can't do either. (I won't pretend that's the limit of my shortcomings, but they're the two most relevant to a blob that includes travel posts.)

I've been making all sorts of wild claims about what I've been up to and not posting any evidence. I will put together a short photo essay when I'm back in Oz and not limited by technical issues. I simply can't load up photos at the moment.

I've been up mountains, in balloons, next to pandas, near dead dogs, on bicycles, between carriages and out to lunch. They're just a couple of the crackers.

Escaping The Jaws Of Evil

I have been to the Giant Panda Research Facility and escaped alive. Just.

In other news, Emergency Contact said it was the best day of her life.

We saw five panda cubs playing on a large wooden swing set. At one point or another, each of them fell off onto their heads. It appeared that they were never happier than when they were going base over apex. It was the cutest thing I have ever seen... now let's never speak of this again.

In still other news, we are in Xi'an which is a great town (only 7 million pop.) and I'm going to stick my neck out here and suggest that the air quality isn't great. Our hotel room comes with a complimentary respirator.

Note

Emergency Contact and I are in China having a strange and wonderful time, in a strange and wonderful place.

Today, I was on a bus weaving in and out of chaotic traffic and enjoying two new flavours of potato crisps. One was mango and the other, cucumber. No joke... and they're good.

Tomorrow, we leave Chengdu and head out to Giant Panda country. OMG. WTF!

The authorities have firewalled the server that I come off normally (no I don't think it's me, just coincidence) and it's only because of the genius and good will of Smurfy who rigged a workaround, that I'm able to update. But apparently that can be a pretty short lived.

So, if I go off the air until late October, it's one of two things.

The Great Firewall of China caught up. (Goddam Mongorians!)

Or the pandas did.

Short And Not So Sweet

I think commonly used words are usually pretty short for a reason. Up, down, in, out, give, take, sit, nap, walk, run, eat, drink, here, there, them, us, you, me; and numbers. Nothing there over five letters and not a whole lot of spare syllables. (Why is seven the only number, in the all important one-to-ten, with two syllables? Was it to make that Sesame Street song scan properly? Discuss.)

Primary concerns and basic ideas get the short, easily understood sounds. You could just about survive with only the words above. You won't debate ontology, but you're not going to die.

I think it says bundles about the difficult history of China that the word for 'hungry' in Mandarin is 'E'.

Moving With The In Crowd

I have become part of a greater whole and fulfilled a dream while I was at it.

I have performed an act that has probably been done by more humans in the 20th and 21st centuries than any other (apart from a couple of obvious "natural" ones).

I have ridden a bicycle, wearing a green-grey cap, in China.

It was exhilarating. Like sky-diving, there's a certain amount of letting fate have its hand. Your skill has only a small say in the outcome. But if you become one of the little fishies, the current is quite relaxing.

Socket To Me

I've had the great fortune to have stayed in some truly, and I use the industry parlance here, fuck-off hotels.

Usually I've been with someone who actually deserves to be there and I've just been the wookie. Or, I was paying through the nose because it was the last bed in town and all the taxis were filled with the vomiting masses. Suffice to say - it's not my usual M.O.

But, every now and then, I've been kicking back in the jacuzzi with a glass of bubbly in my hand, using the remote control to pull back the curtains to give the view its best affect, and I've thought to myself, “Yeah, ok, 5 Star. You can feel the difference.”

I remember the first time I saw a pillow menu. I couldn't help myself and rang down for two softs and a hard. Emergency Contact was in a run-of-the-mill Holiday Inn in Cardiff a few weeks ago, and it had a pillow menu. It's like Mercedes first and then the other cars. You see the feature in an S-Class and ten years later it's standard in a Toyota.

Right now we're in a terrific little surreal hotel in Kowloon... and it's tech-conscious. They've got the next thing that you're about to see everywhere.

Power sockets - in the room safe.

While you're out for the day, your lappy and other tempting devices sit securely, charging away, awaiting your return all safe and snug and ready to go. (If you're already seeing this around, I apologise for being a rube. I am very old yet childishly easy to impress - things like this are a bit, “Well, I never.”).

Scenes From The Mall

Friday, 2nd Of October

It's those who ignore the writing on the wall who get ahead in life.

Rain Strain

You often hear that modern motorcycles can be very hard to pick up if you drop them and that they're not good at keeping you dry. You need a car for that.

Here in steamy Hong Kong, I was just about to cross the road when it started to rain. I was in a jam, and beggars can't be choosers. Looking around, I saw a nice looking Honda, so I hoisted it over my head and headed across to the other side.

I can now vouch for the veracity of those two bits of wisdom.

The rain just came through the spokes and the frame and I might as well have not bothered, considering the twinge I felt in my back when I lifted it.

If it's that difficult with a bike, I'm not going to bother trying a car.

Classy Hong Kong

The chicken was only mildly less surprised than the limb donor.

If They Accept My Membership...

I have always thought that the idea of a mile high club was interesting, but not really because of the sex. No, more as a logistical exercise.

Sex is always going to be interesting to me, it's just that there's a time and a place. One of the times that it is not the place, is in an aeroplane toilet. I am challenged even turning around in the tiny space. The idea of turning someone else on and then being able to do something about it - seems ridiculous.

I thought it had to be the purview of the rich and shameless. First class must have the palatial digs to fool around in. This is the secret to justifying the brain-bending prices of the first class ticket. If you fly up the pointy end, the toilets are huge and filled with willing talent.

Well punters, there's somewhere else. On a 747.400, there's one down the back that wraps around the side of the loo next to it. In aeroplane toilet architectural terms, it's freakin' enormous. That's where the plebs are getting it on, I reckon. Not enough room to swing a cat but certainly enough to get a little... oh, I'm sorry. There were so many bad gags around "the rear" of the plane I was trying to avoid. I was inevitably going to fall down somewhere.