The Flight

I'm sweating and i haven't even been outside yet.
It's midday local time and i've just cleared customs in Mumbai, awaiting my connecting flight to Kochi.
The 8hr flight was uneventful. I tried my usual trick of selecting a business-class seat at random and sitting down as if it were mine. On occasion it works; the plane fills up, but not the business class, and provided you haven't chosen a predesignated seat, you get to travel in style and comfort. I say "on occasion" it works. Actually it has never worked, but that doesn't stop me from trying it on every long-haul flight i catch in the hope that occasionally it might.
On this occasion my seat was actually destined for a little old indian lady. The stewardess spotted the confusion in her eyes, the panic in mine and intervened, asking me for my boarding card. I came clean immediately, this being the inevitable outcome every time i've tried it so far. Kicking up a fuss is only worth it if (a) you're in the wrong, or (b) you have a point to prove. In this case, I was in the wrong, and the only point i was likely to prove by getting into an arguement was that i was a twat.
I smiled poilitely and half-attempted a conspiratorial wink, which had the unintentional effect of making me look a little letcherous and unstable, and slunk back to find my cabin class reservation. If you manage to endear yourself to the cabin crew at this stage, there's a good chance that they'll like you, see you as a cheeky, easygoing chancer and be nice to you later in the flight. At the very worst it's a conversation piece, and let's face it, it's not like them spitting in the food is going to adversely affect it. Occasionally, in the past, I've gotten a free drink or two out of them (and i use the word "occasionally" in the same loose terms as above).
I sat next to a Glaswegian couple, him tattooed and balding and her backcombed and cowering. We made nothingness conversation for a few minutes: They were going to Goa, he'd been before, she hadn't - and as i felt my ability to feign interest wain, the inflight entertainment started.

X-Files The (second) Movie - Paedophile priests and head transplants. Pretty good actually and very close to best episodes of the series before it got all bogged down with aliens and government conspiracies.
and...
The Happening - Which I don't want to go into right now, i'll just get angry. It's in the past, i'm on holiday, hopefully i'll never see or hear of it again. Somehow I always get my flight ruined by Mark Wahlberg.

I slept fitfully for 4 hours, waking occasionally to find that the film had somehow started again in an attempt to torture me in my subconscious.
When we landed and walked out onto the tarmac it was 30degrees and very humid. I was still wearing my jeans and hoodie from November in England so started to sweat immediately. Even the luggage collection room didn't have aircon.
I continued through another set of customs with posters declaring that the importation of animals was strictly forbidden, specifically cats, dogs and ferrets and a "safety first" billboard featuring a large photograph of the concorde exploding on its final flight.
Having cleared visa control with no problem (significant because for some reason, there is normally a problem), I continued on to my flight transfer. The security check was phenomenal. We all queued up while a man with a clipboard ticked off our names from a list. Inevitably, my name was not on the list (something i was able to anticipate from the back of the queue), so the man looked to his supervisor for guidance. The supervisor looked at him, looked at me, looked at the list, looked at my passport, looked at the list again, looked at the man, nodded and simply added my name to the bottom in pencil. You gotta love the Indian emphasis on security.
My luggage was taken from me and given to a teenager in a Slipknot t-shirt who assessed its size with a tape measure, noting the dimensions in a small pocketbook. It was then hurled onto a pile in the corner and I was through to the departure lounge with half-an-hour before my flight to Kochi was to embark.