Ladies and gentleman, welcome on board this feature. My name is John, and I will be your reporter during today’s review of the notorious book, Air Babylon. It will be quite a short, succinct piece and if the seat belt sign is turned on, please return to your seats and buckle up immediately.
Please note before we do take off, in one of my previous lives I was actually a long-haul flight attendant for a well-known Italian business. I travelled around the world for several years enjoying the environments of Cuba, Maldives, Dominican Republic, Mombasa, Calgary, Goa and Florida to name a few. A question I am often asked is that of my favourite destination. Undoubtedly Calgary, a great place for outdoor pursuits and a thriving culture scene. It was quite a lifestyle: staying in five-star hotels and having lots of time off in between. Reality did not just bite, when I had to do a proper occupation with conventional hours, as in so much that it gnawed off my leg.
So to this book, Air Babylon by Imogen Edwards Jones and Anonymous. In a similar formula to Hotel Babylon, the stories all take place within a fictitious airline known as Air Babylon. The action is the life cycle of an airport’s day of operation and a flight. However, like air travel in general, there was a slight delay before the story actually took off. This piece of pulp fiction reminded me of terminology used in this industry I had forgotten, such as disco nap (a quick sleep before a night on the dance floor). It took me right back to what it was like working in the airport, an overpriced shopping centre with runways. I recalled the cast of characters regularly seen, semi-permanent resident tramps, drug addicts and petty thieves.
I could identify with lots of areas covered in the book. For example, some of the customer annoyances and desperately trying to have five minutes’ rest on an upturned silver stock box in the galley, uninterrupted by passengers demanding more booze or snacks. To the in-flight rituals: checking the seat pockets during turn around (when the plane prepares to come back from a short haul flight) to see what treasures are left behind. Things like duty free or books, the occasional oddity like dentures and – on one of my long-haul flights – a sex aid!
It also identified my particular hate, passengers standing up as soon as we landed, even though the fuselage was still in transit,
They’ve been cooped up for hours, fed and watered at someone else’s whim, and now, suddenly they are allowed free will. But it doesn’t make a blind bit of difference. If they are not held up by passport control, Baggage will get them in the end. They’ll all end up standing next to one another in the taxi queue at the other end no matter how speedily they exit the plane.
I will state now though that I am not one to kiss and tell, my personal tales of damage and glamour are filed away in my mind’s eye for my own pleasure and perhaps a few choice friends only. As I worked in the aviation industry, some of the sensationalist factoids quoted in Air Babylon failed to impress. In general, I found the book was like a long-haul fight. It was too, too long and some of the anecdotes made me feel nauseous. I did wonder whether or not the book should be accompanied with a sick bag, as the emphasis was on the grosser elements involved in sharing space with strangers at 35,000 feet. A great deal too much focus on toilet habits!
Where the amount of scenarios encountered in a 24-hour time period in a hotel seemed just about credible, here in the air it is exceptionally unbelievable. With one calamity bungling into the next, this book makes the movie Snakes on a Plane seem plausible. A warning to the cautious, particularly those who feel extremely petrified about flying, a common phobia: THIS BOOK WOULD NOT PROVE APPROPRIATE TRAVEL READING.
I personally find the whole concept of air travel fine. I quite like floating up in the clouds, it is soothing. But I must say I do find the choice of terminology for an airport quite weird, I mean TERMINAL is not a good advertisement for safety. If you have never worked in aviation, Air Babylon will prove to be salacious camp fun, but if you have, perhaps some of the clichés will prove irritating. But then, I often think I was born in the wrong era, as I would have loved to have flown in the bygone golden days, when air travel was elite and the height of sophistication. One of my life ambitions is to travel on the Orient Express and also take the ‘boat’ from Liverpool to New York City.
I remember flying with one debonair lady who was of an undisclosed age. She was couture sophistication, all leather gloves, starched epaulettes and rouge-red lipstick. She never broke a sweat or looked stressed, even after a 15-hour flight to Tel Aviv. Her perfume-scented calmness and smooth glide as she walked turned heads. Every time I saw this vixen of the skies, in comparison to the other new blood who had just begun their careers, it made me think of the song Nowadays from the show CHICAGO and particularly the line,
Whatever happened to class?
A similar sentiment entered my head when I reached the final destination, the end of this book.
Well, as we are shortly about to begin our descent to the end of this piece, may I inform you that I am going to tackle another in the Babylon series, FASHION BABYLON. We do hope you have enjoyed this literary flight. Thank you for flying ten million hardbacks.
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