Firetop

At lunchtime last Friday, Suzie_Q and I had a flight booked with Ryanair to Pescara. Pescara is a large town on the Eastern coast of Italy - roughly on a parallel with Rome. Suzie_Q has a lot of Italian relatives living in nearby Ortona and we were invited to the wedding of her second cousin ‘Fabio’. I met Fabio for the first time last year, spending a day or two with him and his fiancée ‘Francesca’ at their villa and on Fabio’s small boat. Flying to Italy for a wedding isn’t cheap, but it’s an experience you can’t really turn down, so despite being so close to our week in Ibiza, off we went.

There’s only one way to get to Pescara and that’s by flying with Ryanair. Unfortunately this means that they have you over a barrel on ticket price unless you book a year in advance. At £249 return per person it cost more than double what it did to fly to Ibiza and back with British Airways on the previous weekend. Somehow this doesn’t seem quite right when you don’t get allocated seating (it’s a mass bundle for seats unless you have young children). There’s also the narrowest amount of legroom of any airline I’ve ever flown with (not good when you’re 6ft 5â€?). Don’t expect in-flight meals unless you want to buy something from the ‘menu’ – the design of which resembles the sort of promotional leaflet you see inserted in the tabloids for bargain frozen food retailer ‘Iceland‘. Ryanair Flights are essentially a very budget experience at non-budget prices… clever. At least there’s the buy from the bar lottery – one lucky alcoholic passenger takes home a free return flight on Ryanair – not sure that’s a prize really.

One amusing thing I’ve never seen before is an airline recommending that false teeth be removed before using an emergency exit slide (should it be necessary). Perhaps at Ryanair there has been a proven case of an old person tripping at the exit, their teeth flying out of their mouth onto the slide, at which point they fell onto them, puncturing the slide on the way down and resulting in the death of all those still trapped on board? I pity being old if you have to leave behind your glasses, teeth and shoes – I can imagine it now, a partially-sighted old lady shoved down the slide then feeling around at the bottom, arms outstretched, with people asking “Are you OK?â€? to which she replies “I cank shee anyshing an I nee shome shoeshâ€?. She’d resemble most of the old homeless drunk folk I’ve seen wandering Kings Cross.

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