The pang of not being a father
I don’t know what it is about long-haul flights – maybe the cramped conditions the subliminal knowledge that you are whizzing through the atmosphere at 600 mph in a tin tube – but I find my attention span is shortened. I can’t even sit through the on-board films.
On my flight home from Australia there was in the row next to me a couple with their child. He must have been about 18 months. He could walk a little, but still had that elasticity of limb that babies have. One could see his constant self-discovery, the way he was learning about his own body’s incarnation by grabbing on to his own toes and raising them to his mouth, gnawing on a dog-eared blanket, pointing to his own shadow and singing to himself.
