Freedom Fighters at 40,000 ft
Remember, a stranger is just a freedom fighting friend you haven't met yet...
I met Julian in the Business Class bar on an Emirates flight from Auckland to Dubai.
We’d shared the odd glance and polite half-smile at the departure area before introducing ourselves and getting to chatting in the bar area shortly after take off, when the Captain had turned off the seatbelt signs (something which seems to happen much quicker in Business Class, oddly).
I’d upgraded one leg of my long journey back to the UK from Auckland to Dubai, having used some old frequent flyer miles and a bit of cash as a treat for the return journey. After a long week in New Zealand making arrangements for my mother to go into long term care, I was worn out and needed the respite from Economy. I had the words of Aziz Ansari from the show Parks and Recreation (highly recommended) in my ears as I waited in the priority lane, considering whether or not to upgrade, telling me to ‘Go ahead, treat yo’self!’.
The Business Class experience for those who haven’t done it is utterly ruinous. Ruinous in the sense that it makes you starkly aware of how flying works for the ‘haves’ and the ‘have nots’. The service is different, the comfort is elevated to hotel status and the alcohol is given, or rather offered, often and plentifully. The food is much as bad as the other classes, however, laced with seasoning so you can taste something amid the pressurised cabin air and altitude. I say bad because I know it isn’t amazing yet I love the little compartments for my food and array of mini snacks it comes with. real steel cutlery, table cloths and cloth napkins are the icing on an otherwise unappetising cake. Passengers are offered either a mens or women ‘complimentary’ toiletry bag, nothing but the best the house of Bulgari can muster. Complete with razor, retail standard toothbrush, deodorant and a selection of after shaves, balms and cologne. Luxurious is really the only word. The entertainment on the large 20” touch screen is smooth and responsive. Even my complimentary noise cancelling Bose headphones are working a treat to block out any minimal but distracting movements of the crew as they busy themselves preparing the drinks, snacks or meal trolleys.
The bar though is the pièce de résistance!
I sat in one of the rather comfy, limousine style seats complete with seatbelt in the bar with a glass of Saint-Emillion Grand Cru, staring at the big screen tv in the bar showing the flight path, expected arrival time and the time left to travel. Only 16 more hours to go until we land in Dubai!
Julian joins me, asking if the next seat is taken (manners in Business Class are noticeably improved it seems). The stewardess manning the bar, comes over at regular intervals, offering drinks, nuts and chocolates, or rather, petite fours displayed on a high-tea display like the sort of thing you’d get at the Ritz.
Our discussion begins innocently enough and we talk all things work, what brought us to be on our respective trips. Julian’s being a trip back to London to check in on his investment properties (he formerly ran his own construction business in NZ before retiring early and dissolving the company). We chat about family, wives, work and children. Hotel bar kind of stuff really.
Sitting in this apartment block in the sky, the gigantic A380-800 capable of transporting up to 853 (no idea why the odd number) passengers continuously for over 15 hours, its an odd reflection to look back at the last 3 years. No-one could have imagined in 2020 as the dark cloud of the Pandemic™ descending upon us, spreading to all four corners of the ‘globe’, that I’d be sitting in this plane on this journey unknowingly sitting with one of our own.
I mention Covid tentatively and wrap it up within a work discussion about travel and how that was cancelled abruptly, leaving work to be no more than a series of zoom calls, complete with their own commentaries about those who had tested ‘positive’ and were isolating, or those who had been ‘fortunate’ enough to find a vax centre without a queue around the block, or those claiming to be in the midst of the deadly disease, each sniffle exaggerated for effect. No-one, of course, speaking of its origin or its symptoms too deeply. Julians eye rolls and fairly audible tuts told me that perhaps he too had not succumbed to the tell-lie-vision’s proclamations of a worldwide outbreak of a deadly ‘virus’. I wasn’t 100% sure though and didn’t really fancy getting into it in an already claustrophobia-inducing tin can in the sky. Even though I felt somehow that I was talking to one of the gang, it wasn’t until one of his eye rolls ended in “the fucking PCR test, right!?” that I knew with certainty that I was speaking to a friend.
Our conversation (and our volume) at this point ratcheted up to 8 and we both noticed that the bar attendant was paying close attention, despite her efforts to look as though we weren’t tearing apart every lie, every fake claim and putting to rights all the wrongs committed on the people of this world in the name of their sCienCe™ and their facts™. Julian tells me he’s never worn a mask and makes a point of informing me he’s not taken any of the Vax either, both of us marvelling at the mystery illnesses and ‘sudden deaths’ now cropping up since the introduction of the miracle injections.
Our lives, separated by more than 10,000 miles, yet mirrored in many ways. Julian, a brit living in New Zealand and I a Kiwi making my home in the UK, yet our experiences so similar. We both had run-ins with Mask Nazis and ‘experts’ trying to educate us lay folks about the nature of disease and of contagion™. We both held the awkward conversations with our family members about our position on it all, both equally losing long term friendships due to the same.
Several times our glasses are refilled (I suspect mostly so the attendant can get closer to hear us better) and I notice that Julian has stealthily polished off an entire bottle of the stunning Sauvignon Blanc on offer.
We laugh, slightly tipsy (Julian, hiding the effects of the bottle like a man practiced at handling his drink) often at the whole charade, the theatre and its actors. I can feel I’m more animated than usual. Its like meeting likeminded people on the tube on the way to a rally. Everyone seems to want to talk it out and connect intellectually and spiritually about it. It’s a kind of catharsis and almost like a form of therapy, letting it out. I remember the first rally I went to in Bristol and thinking, wow, finally here are the others! It was the same feeling, to discover, in the most unlikely of places (or so Id have thought) one of the tribe, full of all the convictions and knowledge of one who has done the hard yards of disagreeing; who has scoured the studies and listened to both the dissenting and the compliant voices, putting them through the same cerebral rigour and arriving at the same conclusion. Its all BS…
This chance encounter, unexpected but utterly welcomed, had a profound impact on me. It filled me again with a hopefulness for our kind… mankind, and showed me afresh that we aren’t alone, isolated on our island, or resigned to only the most populous of places, no, we are everywhere. Even in Business Class. No longer are we reaching out in the darkness like those first bleak and seemingly endless days of tyranny, crying out out in the hope that we will find the others like us, trying to make connections where we could. No, we are now magnetic. Having imbibed together from the collective cup of truth, we attract each other, like moths to the flame, each of us, perhaps subconsciously, acting as a beacon of hope and sanctuary. It’s written on us maybe somehow, like invisible ink on a VCR, we are marked with knowledge and branded with that conviction and purpose (ok, maybe that’s slightly hyperbolic, but you get where I’m going…).
I recall as the perspex windows were installed in cafes and restaurants and the mask insanity was in full swing, thinking of the day when they would all be torn down and ripped away again. The bollards widening the pavements to encourage anti-social distancing taken to the tip and resigned to the scrapheap of history. It feels closer than ever now that the tipping point (excuse the pun) is approaching where the guilty will be exposed and these props of the great con burned on the pyre of their lies. I’ll be there, in the front row (likely taking pictures), celebrating freedom as many of have done these past years and continue to do.
As we near the precipice of that time we must remember always the promises we made. The promises made to each other, to our loved ones and children. The ones spoken softly to a lover or whispered to a child as they drift to sleep or the ones we’ve declared in our hearts. Solemn oaths to protect, to educate, and to guide.
I’m reminded of my favourite piece by my friend Bob Moran and think of it often. A father and child sit atop a hill, the boy asks “What happens in the end?”. The fathers response, simply “We win”.
If my children ever ask me. I know my answer will be the same…
We Win…
K.
PS - I did take a selfie with Julian of course…
I loved your story Kerry. Just fab that you met Julian a kindred spirit. I’ve only travelled business class once on the way home from Florida. What a way to travel, so civilised and the 🍸🍸🍸🍹🍹🍹 It is somehow comforting to find a likeminded soul especially on such a long flight. That particular cartoon by Bob Moran always brings a lump to my throat. We have to believe that we will win in the end otherwise hope is lost.