If asked to compare traveling in a 17th or 18th-century stagecoach with flying in modern airplanes, the advantage would surely lean heavily in favor of the former. True, it might be a bit bumpier, and you might be courteously asked to “stand and deliver” by a gentleman of the road, but this had a slightly romantic frisson. The only person in real peril was the highwayman himself. True, it might cost you a wallet or some pricey bauble, but you could boast for the rest of your life about your encounter with the legendary Claude Du Vall or James MacLaine. Sadly, these gentlemen were able to do very little boasting after developing extremely sore throats at Tyburn Tree.
As for the other passengers, if they proved uncongenial or even malodorous, you could either have the coachman eject them or take a brief sojourn at a tavern and wait for the next stagecoach.
With modern air travel, there is no room for escape, and conditions are even more cramped than in the London-to-Exeter coach. Take my present highly uncomfortable position. After enduring all the indignities of modern travel—the security check, the full-body scans, and so on—I am squeezed into a seat aboard a plane heading to Washington. It is the early hours, and all the other passengers are asleep, except for myself and a rather odd, hooded individual who is staring at me balefully through dark sunglasses. I blame myself for this ... slightly.
The Manga/Ninja warrior appeared just before the plane's doors closed and took the empty seat across the aisle from me. With a histrionic swirl of robes that might have put one in mind of Dick Turpin, were it not for the fact that the robes were covered in Chinese ideograms. Something distinctly comical about him made the whole effect less than sinister. I suspect it was his obvious yearning for dramatic effect—the sheer silliness of the look, especially the dramatically swirling robes. I am on the plump side myself, and this I know: we don't do “sinister” particularly well, and we definitely should never consider posing as Ninjas. Well, the most excellent Sydney Greenstreet did exude dark malevolence brilliantly, but no director in his right mind would have cast him as, say, a kung fu hero.
I have been meandering a bit, as I feel guilty and not a little tired, having been up for the best part of 24 hours. You’ll be wondering what I did to incur the wrath of my new acquaintance. I am ashamed to say it, but I might have grinned—just possibly—although I immediately afterward adopted a neutral expression, as though it were the most natural thing in the world to meet a ninja on the “red-eye” flight to Washington. I then began frantically scribbling these notes to pass the long hours (I can never sleep on planes) and to distract myself from the glare.
“Mocking the afflicted,” the more moralistic of you might gasp. I’d counter that the chap was merely an extreme example of what most of us do, and he might even be seen as satirizing us. All but the least self-conscious among us prepare faces to meet the faces that we meet. We want to impress and, for example, casually place hugely intellectual tomes on our coffee tables or pretend that the cordon bleu dish we’ve spent all day working on was thrown together in minutes.
[Later] You may be pleased to hear that I made amends for my faux pas. As we disembarked, without a hint of a smirk, I told the ninja warrior that he looked absolutely amazing and that I had never seen anything quite like it. He seemed pleased.
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I am afraid this was dashed off rather quickly, but I am utterly jet lagged.
