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Sep 02, 2023

A stationary plane and screeching kids get our holiday off to a sub

I knew our holiday was off to a bad start when it refused to start at all. Our flight to Lanzarote had already been delayed an hour before we’d boarded, bringing us perilously close to the baby’s

I knew our holiday was off to a bad start when it refused to start at all. Our flight to Lanzarote had already been delayed an hour before we’d boarded, bringing us perilously close to the baby’s midday nap. Could be worse, we thought, if she sleeps on the plane, we could get two hours’ sleep out of this three-hour flight.

After an hour on the runway, we were still being informed that take-off was 20 minutes away – this would be the same, entirely stationary, 20 minutes we’d been chasing for the previous 60. Secondly, instead of her usual two-hour nap, our baby decided on one of those express sleeps, the kind that parents share tales of round campfires, the kind that leave your sweet little cherub as wide awake as a soldier roused by gunfire, happily screaming with the plane still 20 minutes from starting its three-hour journey.

Things, surely, couldn’t get much worse. With a furiously crying baby and an increasingly bored young boy on my hands, not to mention a wife who was thinking many unkind things about my adult capabilities, I decided I should get some more things to distract them (by this I mean my kids, there is little on God’s green earth that can distract my wife from her husband’s human failings). In reaching for the overhead locker, I received a stern and, I think, needlessly personalised message from the steward telling ‘all’ passengers to sit down and belt up.

I apologised, uselessly and out loud, to no one, and sank back into my seat, red-faced and sullen. My wife was now looking out the window, hoping our fellow passengers would regard my facial similarity to her two children as mere coincidence. Things, surely, could not get much worse.

Well, guess what. We’d been airborne for an hour when I withdrew my daughter’s water bottle from my illegally requisitioned bag. Wearily, I flipped its cap, and wondered, truly wondered, at the absurd geyser of water that leapt from it. In something like a dream state, I marvelled as a solid column of liquid spurted 6ft into the air, hitting the dimmer switches and aircon panels above, before cascading down on me and the woman in front, who reacted with an entirely appropriate ‘JESUS CHRIST!’ By the time she’d said this, water was still coming out of the bottle, as the wonders of cabin pressure proved faster than my own failing mind, leaving me and my front neighbour soaked and confused, and me again apologising profusely and uselessly dabbing her chair with wet wipes – not excellent for water absorption, I can confirm – with the majority of a four-hour flight still left to go.

Yes, four-hour flight. In our haste – OK, my haste, – I’d seen that the arrival time was four hours after departure, but had helpfully decided that this was due to time difference. I had not realised that Lanzarote, despite being a Spanish territory, has the same time zone as the UK. So the three-hour flight we’d booked and arranged ourselves with full knowledge of all its details, was not three hours long, but four, and would be undertaken soaking wet, ashamed and wreathed in screaming children. ‘At least things can’t get much…’ I began, before my wife shot me a look that made me think better of it.

Did Ye Hear Mammy Died? by Séamas O’Reilly is out now (Little, Brown, £16.99). Buy a copy from guardianbookshop at £14.78

Follow Séamas on Twitter @shockproofbeats