I boarded the Embraer 170 from Glasgow to London City early, and was seated in brief gleaming comfort in a Club Europe window seat 2D.

An extremely large lady, with an inevitable American accent, had been allocated seat 1B but was unable to fit her superfluous anatomy into this seat, since the sides of the front row boast a solid piece of plastic between the armrest and the seat cushion that encloses the space where her abundant derriere would otherwise have been free to spill-out into the aisle. So, the lady in question asked to switch with the lady next to me in 2C, and attempted to wedge herself into the still unequivocally inadequate seat next to me and, as it turned out, into most of my seat too. Oh no!

Unfortunately, the best she was able to achieve was to sit with her left buttock in 2C and much of the aisle, while the majority of her right buttock was to be found atop my left thigh, which was very much within the boundaries of seat 2D (you know, the one I paid for). Very awkward, not to say uncomfortable and, if you'll forgive the imagery, unpleasantly warm and clammy. Any thoughts of retrieving my mobile phone and headphones from my left pocket didn't bare contemplation. It also won't surprise you to learn that she was unable to lower the center armrest, which remained pointing 45 degrees skyward for the entire flight, and she was equally incapable of fastening her seatbelt - requesting a normal extension would have been as pointless as peeing on a forest fire. I feel obliged to point out that both of these situations are in direct contradiction of the light-hearted and "hilarious" new pre-flight safety videos which I have been urged to observe on more occasions than I care to count. As would my inability to have adopted "the brace position", even had I wanted to.

For my part, I was left jammed into the fuselage of the aircraft like some kind of invisible spec of dust on the reverse side of an enormous elephant's bottom, with one shoulder hard against the wall and my right hip painfully pushed against the right arm rest, and my spine tilted over at a Quasimodo-esque angle. I felt quite dizzy, though I'm not sure whether to attribute this to the unusual pressures being applied to my rib cage, the gradual dislocation of my hip, or to my seat-mate's quite unique odour -- a sickly sort of cross between Parmesan and Almond. And here we remained, unpleasantly entwined for the next 80 minutes.

The cabin crew were ineffective in my predicament, though I cannot blame them, since I was probably mostly invisible from the aisle by now, and there were no free seats anyway. Rather, I'd blame the airline's apparent lack of foresight or policy that might have required my three-seat-wide seat-mate to buy more than one seat. A lack of policy which also robbed me of my personal space, my hitherto excellent posture, my nasal sensitivity, and most of what I had believed to be the airline's side of our terms of contract.

I doubt very much that my seat-mate was particularly comfortable with the whole ordeal either, though sadly it didn't appear to provide her with the motivation to avoid the free meal.