More Single-Serving Adventures

A most relaxing and carefree week endured in the Canaries got off to a phenomenally enjoyable start thanks to my latest single-serving friends. While lacking the erudition and sobriety of my last acquaintances, the couple who sat beside me on the flight over to Fuerteventura provided me with just the right dose of entertainment to get me in the mood for my hols.

Better half and I had been pre-booked seats because of my inordinate height, but it turned out some sadist had allocated us a window and a middle seat, so better half kicked up a fuss (which she’s very good at, by the way) and got us both aisle seats, across the way from one another.

As we walked onto the plane, ahead of most other passengers, better half selected her seat first, across from my new acquanitances, who were already ensconced. Better half’s astuteness soon became apparent, and post-flight conversation with her confirmed that she knew right away, just from looking at this pair, what I was in for.

Single-server couple were young, about mid-twenties, he with closely cropped but unshaven black hair, moustachioed and wiry, with T-shirt and jeans, she pleasantly plump in some lime green outfit you’d only wear on holiday. Less readily apparent, since they were sat down and not trying to walk around, was the fact that they were already “nicely sozzled.”

“I can tell you now, we’ll be up and down the whole flight,” was his greeting, in a broad Dub accent. I smiled politely, suggesting it was no problem but not realizing that he meant that the pissing would be almost constant.

Having successfully got past the flight attendants, and once the plane was in the air, single servers ordered a Red Bull from the cabin staff and surreptitiously opened their litre bottle of duty-free Smirnoff (Fuerteventura’s a duty-free island, so you can buy cheap booze at the airport on the way out). Vodka and Red Bull thus flowed copiously, if on the Q.T., for the next hour, the flow interrupted every 15 minutes or so by one of the two deciding they needed a piss.

To be fair, male single-server offered me a vodka early on. I declined, explaining that I’d been sampling the free whiskey at the airport and wouldn’t be able to read if I drank anymore.

“Good man. Whiskey. Puts hairs on yer chest. I’d be drinking it meself if it weren’t for this cunt,” he said, referring to his companion. “But you’ve got to live with the cunts, haven’t yer?”

At which he gave me a broad grin, revealing for the first time the only two teeth that were left in his head. Fuck me, I thought. They’ve sat me next to Cletus.

For another hour they worked their way through the litre of vodka, with the odd piss now and again, he at one point commenting on my choice of wine with my meal with the immortal observation, “I don’t know why you’re drinking their shit when there’s vodka here.”

Again, credit where it’s due: All this was said in a spirit of camaraderie. Neither of them was a nasty drunk; rather, they were impressive drunks with really small bladders.

Bladders that were their undoing. After about two hours, the cabin staff sussed what was going on, so that when female single server went to the loo for about the 19th time and male tried to pour himself another wee snifter, male flight attendant came down the aisle and relieved him of the bottle, explaining,

“You can’t drink duty-free alcohol on the flight.”

This could have resulted in fisticuffs across my seat, I thought, except male single-server was by this point so langered that he was incapable of response. His head dropped, he surrendered the bottle, and bowed his head to gaze forlornly into the empty bag at his feet. Needless to say, when female single server returned from the loo, she was raging at him and it quickly became clear to any observer just who was in charge in that relationship.

I didn’t understand why, however, until the following sequence of events played themselves out. Over the next two hours, male single server would drop off to sleep for ten minutes or so, then wake up and start searching his bag for the vodka. He'd spend ages bent double, rifling through his plastic carrier bag, then searching under his seat, then he’d wake up female single server and say, “Where’s the vodka?” and she’d have to explain to him that the flight attendant had taken it off him.

“No cunt took the vodka off me,” he’d say, then lapse into a melancholic stupor for another ten minutes or so until waking up again and repeating the whole performance.

After about an hour of this, my shoulder muscles were in agony from laughing so much. The poor sod might have had some sort of early-onset Alzheimer’s or alcohol-induced petite mal fits, I don’t know, but seeing him wake up, search for his duty-free, wake up his partner, then fall back to sleep again, over and over, and never any the wiser, afforded me all the fun I felt I was entitled to after the many, many times he’d made me get out of my seat so he could piss Red Bull and Vodka into the airplane’s innards.

It really made my holiday.

And, unbelievably, they were on my flight home yesterday. Sober. “Incredible,” I thought. “How the hell did they manage to avoid being deported in the intervening seven days?”

Maybe the locals got as much fun out of them as I did.

I should really buy them both a drink.