Can Mr Stork please come to gate 31?

It was almost midnight when our creaky old 747 pulled out of Singapore and headed for the turbulent skies over Asia. It felt like midnight to me but Singapore is an aviation hub and my fellow travellers would have come from Katmandu, Karachi and Canberra and their body clocks would be all over the place.

The grumpy British Airways crew didn’t care however and were determined to feed everyone a choice of two stews before filling them with sufficient alcohol to get them to sleep. My experience of long haul flying is that flight crew want to do as little as possible and having a comatose passenger list is the best way of achieving this.

In my backpack I was carrying the 20 week scan pictures of my unborn child, which I was bringing home to show to my family. I felt a connection at that point because flying isn’t much different to being carried in the womb. You are snugly strapped in and fed periodically by a mother type creature who delivers food of such sickly consistency it might as well be delivered intravenously. And all the time, you are carried along in a hermetically sealed container. The main difference however is that my future child is on their own while I had 300 other twins to share the space with.

There was a time when the Boeing 747 was the most glamorous ship in the sky. In my early teens I was a plane spotter (there was little else to do in 70’s Ireland) and the highlight of each day’s spotting was when the Aer Lingus flight from New York would arrive and the beautiful bulbous head of that magnificent machine would appear over the horizon.

But times have changed. The double decked Airbus 380 is now the king of flying and the poor old 747 looks like a sad uncle who tries to get down and dance with the teenagers at a wedding. The one I was travelling on looked like it helped out during the Berlin airlift. Everything rattled, lights flickered on and off and a strange alarm went off periodically to the annoyance of the passengers and confusion of the crew. I was left to hope that the engines were better attached and that the controls on the flight deck weren’t connected to the same system as the entertainment platform, which seemed to have a mind of its own.

Thankfully, the plane was only one third full and I was able to stretch out across three seats in an attempt to get some sleep. Singapore to London is thirteen hours of endless boredom and catching some sleep is a must. Unfortunately, airplane seats are uncomfortable enough when you’re sitting upright. Lie across three and you’ll feel belt buckles and seat ridges biting into you. I’m also just a little too tall for this process and to gain some level of comfort, I had to dangle my legs out beyond the seats and into the passageway.

This meant that every time I achieved some level of slumber, I’d be rudely awakened by a whack from a passing trolley or the drunk like swaying of a passing geriatric with bowl problems on their way to the midget sized toilets down the back.

I tried watching movies but Hollywood produces better golfers now than movies. At least it’s better than the old days when movies were shown on a screen at the front of the plane and had to be edited down so as not to show any offensive bits. This meant that Borat would run for about 15 minutes on a plane.

These days, you can choose from hundreds of movies beamed directly to a matchbox sized screen in the back of the seat in front of you, even when sitting down the back in cattle class. This allows for viewer discretion and so the movie is shown in full. I was once watching the above mentioned Borat on an international flight.

There is a scene where he ties a weight to his willy and swings it like a pendulum. This is shown in close up and I was rather embarrassed and tried to turn it off. The remote control had fallen between my legs and under the blanket in which I was wrapped. While I was desperately fumbling , I noticed an elderly passenger to my right who was staring alternatively in horror at the screen and the movements beneath my blanket.

My next trip to Europe will, God willing, be in May 2012 when my wife and I will bring our new born child back to Ireland to be Christened. I doubt if I’ll be watching too many movies on that trip. Families with small kids have been the bane of my international travel experience and I have often said that I would pay a premium to travel on an airline that had an over twelve’s policy. But very soon I’ll be part of that set. Changing nappies during turbulence, pacing the aisles with the geriatrics with bowel problems and trying to muffle screams while the rest of the flight is trying to sleep.

It’s all ahead of me as people keep saying, as though we were the first couple in the world to ever have a baby. It seems strange that humans have been doing this since the dawn of time yet most people seem to think it’s the scariest and most exhausting thing you’ll over do.

Maybe they are right. To date, climbing into a metal box and been flown to 36,000 feet by a stranger while travelling nonstop for 36 hours is the most frightening and exhausting thing I’ve ever done. So I don’t have much to compare it to. But new life surely is nature’s most wonderful gift. I’m looking forward to it, particularly as it means I’ll have somebody to hold my arm when I’m stumbling towards the midget sized toilets as a geriatric with bowel problems.