| [Tags**|children, flights, jetlag, klm, travel] [Current Mood** |
optimistic]Nothing fixes jet-lag but time. I've tried various regimes of brute-forcing my diurnal cycle with drugs and exercise and food and forced wakefulness, and it never makes enough difference to justify the effort and fuss. The biochemical diurnal rhythms of the body just have too much inertia to be easily affected by that stuff. These days I just roll with it, sleep when I will and can, take modest amounts of caffeine¹ to tide me through the day, and let my jangled biorhythms settle down in their own time. It's just as easy as any other way of dealing with the jet-lag, and a whole lot more relaxed.My indispensable survival tips for air travel remain, quite simply, (1) ear-plugs, and (2) lots and lots to drink, and not that kind of drink either.The trip out to San Francisco was infested with children. At the departure gate for the short hop to Amsterdam, a small child threw a tantrum, and fifty fellow passengers emitted a palpable common thought-bubble: "I hope to God I'm not sitting next to you." So I sat down and found myself next to the small child; who turned out to be an enchanting dark-eyed whelp from Peru. The mother and I barely had a language in common, but she was an inexperienced flyer and didn't really know how to deal with anything from the seat-belt buckle onwards, so I advised her and entertained the child and afterwards one of the KLM cabin-staff very sweetly thanked me for my help. I glowed.Then, on the long-haul flight, O horror—two small children, in the seats to my right and left, from different families, but both of them already having travelled from Nairobi to Amsterdam, and now flying on to the USA! And the one on the left was accompanied only by a fairly clueless mother, who didn't know about bringing child entertainment on the flight, or keeping the sprog well hydrated, or any of the things that make everybody's lives more bearable in the tight confines of an aeroplane. When the child started acting up, she simply told it to sit still in its seat, which is of course a physical impossibility for a three-year-old on a ten-hour flight.So, making a virtue of necessity, I befriended the sprog and played small games with it and we held long conversations, mostly about fish, even though communication was hampered by my abject failure to speak any of Swahili, highly accented babyese English, or the unknown tribal language through which the child's speech oscillated with carefree agility. By the end of the flight we were firmly in love, and waved and called endless goodbyes to each other as we were separated to our respective queues for quality-control by the semi-mechanical guardians of the American border realm.It did throw an unholy tantrum somewhere over Wyoming, but by then it'd been in the talons of public transport for over twenty-four hours and I really couldn't blame it.So I think it's established that (a) I actually really like children, and (b) I'm even fairly good with them.KLM were just wonderful—punctual, efficient, lovely staff, borderline edible food, and aeroplanes that didn't fall out of the sky, while also being among the cheapest tickets going at the time.¹ I'm getting much better at caffeine now that I've paid close attention to its long-term effects on me. These days I can drink a cup without entirely shafting myself; I just need to consider first how it's going to affect my sleep and behaviour for the next two days. |