On resisting temptation

Wanna guess which is the worst seat on the plane? No... not the one next to the loo. Nope, not a middle seat, which is claustaphobic without the benefit of a window... nope, not even the seat bang in the middle of 4 couples with 3 infants each...

It's an emergency exit seat.

Not just ANY emergency exit seat. It's the one RIGHT next to the exit.

So its got a lot more leg room, you say, right? It's the best seat in the plane, right? Wrong. True, your legs have a little more space to sprawl, and your knees aren't constantly rubbing against the guys next to you (because you never - as a rule - NEVER get lucky enough to sit next to a hot chick on a plane), but there are many other perils of that seat.

For one it doesn't recline. That's pretty bugging if you ask me. And what's the point of more leg room if your back has to be all upright anyway? To add to that, you don't have an armrest on the side of the exit. Yup. No armrest. Check it out the next time you're sitting there. And obviously the fat guy sitting next to you has taken up all of the other armrest.

What's worse is that the seat in front of you doesn't have a table that falls down in front. So you have to wake up Fat Guy so that he can get his Fat Arm of the armrest so you can get your table out when the food comes. Then Fat Guy eats so fast, and promptly falls back asleep so you have to wake him up again when Nice Lady With Too Much Makeup comes back for the trays. Now I wouldn't have minded making Nice Lady wait a while, but on this particular flight, I was fortunate enough to have Clean-shaved Neanderthal Male With Frown waiting on me.

So all of this is but natural, and not in the least bit relevant to the seat, and well, not so unbearable; and you're right. I haven't come to the best part yet.

You can't keep your hand luggage under the seat in front of you - it has to go in the overhead compartment. So I didn't have the pleasure of switching between music and literature on this journey. Unless I wanted to get up, wake up Fat Guy and the chap sitting next to him a couple of times in order to switch between White Stripes and Bill Bryson.

Not the best part.

The window next to this seat is a little square in the door the size of my palm, supposedly to see whether or not its safe to get out of the emergency exit in the case of a catastrophy. So, no pretty lights, no painted oceans, nothing by the way of aesthetic comfort during take-off and landing to compensate for being in a metal box whizzing through the air on the collective prayers of first-time travelers.

Nope, still not the best part.

The best part is that a nervous, jumpy, impulsive human being like me had to spend the entire flight sitting next to a door ---- wait for it ---- marked "Pull".