“Rudeness is the last refuge of the unimaginative”

A MAN comes down the aisle, munching chilli nuts and looking left and right.

I’m in seat 23a. He wrestles with luggage and nuts over my head for a while, sits in seat 23b and chomps loudly like a pony. At this stage, on the final flight of my long journey home, my antenna for undesirable travelling companions is highly sensitised. I’m panicking about having to engage in yet another conversation from which I can’t escape.

I’ve got nothing left in the tank; all sorts of elements have conspired to empty it.

On a flight earlier this morning, I found myself wedged between the plane’s external wall and a garrulous middle-aged woman. She was wearing a patterned jumper perfect for walking the dogs in the dark and wanted to talk about a residential course on spiritual and sexual enlightenment that she’d just attended. Nothing less nuanced than “put a sock in it” was going to stop her. She particularly loved one module — trance dancing — because it helped her to express her sexuality in new ways, To Just Let Go and Get Physically Nurtured.

I tried to blank my features but found it impossible when the conversation, peppered with words like Healing and Release, reached its nadir with an intimate disclosure concerning a sexual position called the Wheelbarrow. At this point, my features relaxed into an expression you’d find on the face of an affronted Benedictine nun.

So now, when the chilli nut man offers me a nut, I am wary. A bag-checker customs lady has just binned my Clarins Beauty Flash Balm and my reserves of patience are low.

I decline his offer of a nut with a polite smile. He asks: “Been anywhere nice?”

I tell him I’ve been to Geneva to celebrate my sister-in-law’s birthday.

“Oh? How old?” He asks.

“Same as me, 45.” I smile. Perhaps, I think, in a minute I can turn my face to the window and feign sleep, but he continues: “That’s a tough one isn’t it? I mean, for women anyway. Ha, ha, ha, ha, haaa.”

“Tough for women specifically?” I ask, smiling politely again.

Encouraged by my smile, which is not a smile but the lid on a scream, he says: “Yeah, I mean, it’s… like… a cut-off point, isn’t it?”

“A cut-off point for what?” I ask.

“You know… looks… being sexy and stuff. I mean women define themselves by their looks more than men, so it’s harder for them when they hit their 40s.”

I think of my Spanish sister-in-law with her Pocahontas good looks. At 45, she’s not spring pretty but she’s autumn beautiful. I look at the man and am tempted to point out that my sister- in-law has, at least, some looks to lose and that it seems to have escaped his notice that he has not. But this tart rejoinder is brutal and so stays within the confines of my head.

I envy people who always manage to serve a pithy riposte on time. My cerebral cogs often yield the perfect retort a second too late. Now, for example, I feel one arrive on the tip of my tongue just as the glory moment for its delivery passes.

“My ex-wife hated turning 40,” he says.

I need to move the conversation sideways. I know this isn’t going to happen if I ask him why his ex-wife hated turning 40 but my brain has emptied; I’m concentrating too hard on leaving “put a sock in it” unsaid. I hear myself ask him why? And with this, fluff my chance to zip him up and redirect the conversational flow.

He explains why his wife’s 40th birthday was such a miserable milestone and expounds a deeply misogynistic theory about life and how it comes to an abrupt end for women at 40. I protest that I have enjoyed my 40s so far but he doesn’t buy it; he’s convinced I’m lying because, roughly translated, no woman likes turning from a sex-pot into a withered old prude.

My husband and daughters meet me at the airport and I give them a brief account of these conversations in the car. They scoff. They can’t understand why I didn’t kill the passengers with one sentence. After all, they say contentiously, “you do that with us.” I’m tired, but fortunately for me, I’m no longer on a plane in the company of strangers. Rudeness is the last refuge of the unimaginative but I don’t care, I’ll use anything that will do the job. I find what I need in my empty tank and feel it arrive on the tip of my tongue. “Put a sock in it,” I say.