“You want to sit next to the fat lady?”

Today I thought I’d take a brief break from writing about Western civilisation’s crazy suicide and instead recount a boring little story of how people’s obsession with being politically-correct actually helped me.

At the weekend, I took a long-haul flight from an Asian country (the land of the RFFMs, since you asked) back to Londonistan Heathrow airport.

I was flying premium monkey class and the cabin had a 2-4-2 configuration. I was in seat 22h (an aisle seat) and the seat beside me was 22j (a window seat). On boarding I noticed to my horror that seat 22j was occupied by an extremely fat Indian woman in her thirties. Being so fat, she also took up a goodly part of my seat. It was clear the next 13 hours were going to be pretty horrific.

Then suddenly some divine power intervened. The man who had the seat in front of me (21h) misjudged and sat in my seat (22h) by mistake. Seizing my chance, I said loudly to him “you want to sit next to the fat lady? Oh, that’s ok. Then I’ll just take your seat” and dumped my rucksack on 21h.

Everybody around, of course, heard me and the fat lady turned several shades of puce and gave me an ‘I’d like to kill you’ stare. I guess that in today’s politically-correct world nobody mentioned to her that she was extremely gravitationally challenged and too large for one passenger-plane seat.

But the poor guy was trapped – trapped by political correctness. If he stood up and tried to get away from the fat lady, that would be politically-incorrect. So he was stuck – stuck beside the fat lady for 13 hours. Meanwhile I, who was fairly tanked up having wangled my way into the business class lounge during a 2-hour delay, slept very well for much of the trip.

(Please note, I am not criticising the fat lady for being fat. I’ve always been overweight too. What I am criticising her for is that she should recognise she was too large for a premium monkey class seat and either travel business class or else pay for two seats. It’s the height of selfishness to make someone else’s flight a total misery because you can’t control your own weight)