FlyerTalk Forums - Flying with one's wife...a warning to all! AKL-DUD

I don’t often fly for anything other than work and it is even rarer that I fly with Mrs Jafa in tow…..here is what happens when I do.

We were heading off to Dunedin to stay with some old friends and do a motorcycle tiki-tour of Central Otago, known for its stunning scenery and empty roads.

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We were booked on NZ671, a direct 737-300 flight to DUD from AKL. We left at some ungodly hour so we could have breakfast at the airport, which may sound strange but it is preferable to being stuck in a Nissan Maxima at Eeek o’clock with a recently recaffeinated Mrs Jafa, it brings her Jewish blood to the surface and life becomes like a cross between a Woody Allen Movie and a Sit-Com about insane Jewish M-I-L-F’s.

Not that I don’t love her dearly, its just that I can’t eat before 06:30 and I need the thickness of skin that toast and marmalade can bring in the chilly pre-dawn before getting within hailing range of the significant other.

She was on form this morning, whether it was pre-flight nerves or just that she really is a control freak I would not dare to comment. I did my best to ignore her until we were halfway down highway 1 and her hard-wired need to criticise my driving came into play.

Hiding under the dash board and screaming because my foot started to come off the accelerator a nano-second after she thought it should is the way it usually starts, today was no exception…then I get defensive and try to explain what I was doing with the controls of the car at the time of her freakout and also to point out that the car that was about to kill or maim us was actually still on the horizon and that leads to threats of violence.

I momentarily considered a hard right off the southbound and onto the northbound so we could just go home and forget the whole trip but I managed to distract her by talking about her Dad, which sends her off in a flat spin but at least it isn’t directed at me.

With only 20 or so further comments on my driving we made it to the airport where my choice of carpark space was put under scrutiny…”Why?” She asked, did I insist on parking as far away from the exit stairs as possible?….did I hate her that much that I wanted her die of exhaustion and hypothermia walking 80 metres across the car park?…the UNCOVERED car park at that!

I explained that I always parked in the same spot so I knew where the car was each time as after 240-odd business flights, small details, such as where one parked the Nissan, are easily confused….so I park where I park and nobody else is fool enough to park that far from the stairs but as the trolley park is near where I park, those philistines who insist on parking near the exit have to walk twice as far if they need a trolley.

I think she was holding her breath and trying to die by the time I had explained all this to her.

And that is how we have managed to stay married for 27 years…..when she demands an explanation I make sure it bores her to death…or some similar state that renders incapable of speech.

Inside the terminal I made a hash of the self check-in thing and had to do it again as having Mrs Jafa with me had made me press “yes” to the question “Are you carrying any dangerous goods such as firearms” I regard Jewish M-I-L-F’s as highly dangerous and Mr Freud did the rest…..so I re-checked us in and had to explain in 100 words or more why we were sitting at the back…I left out the fact that our cheapo tickets didn’t allow us to sit any further forward than row 15…as I am opposed to public displays of domestic violence.

We stumbled into “The Bach” for breakfast with 20 mins to go before boarding and I politely sat through Mrs J’s tirade about the awful coffee and the subsequent monologue about how well the Café would do if she ran it and sent everybody off to their uncertain fate with handmade Jams and poncey bread in their bellies…I pointed out that the Bach’s best seller at early o’clock was Mince on Toast and she conceded that hadn’t taken into account the appalling diet of the average Kiwi traveler.

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For reasons unknown to me the queue for the X-Ray was the longest I have ever seen it and because I hate being the one who holds up the flight I said I would get into the queue so she could finish her ground acorns and UHT Milk drink in peace and I would pick her up as I went past in the line.

Now I do not allow Mrs J to wander about in airports on her own, the reasons for this are complex, one is that she has the power to become invisible at random and has no control over when that may be, there is also that incident in Portugal when she got me lead away at gunpoint as I did the protective male thing and claimed that the replica gun in her carry-on was in fact mine…and then there was that awful moment in Hurghada when the soldier stuck a loaded AK-47 up her skirt….no, Mrs J has to be kept close to hand in airports….

For the above reasons I forbade her to go and use the Ladies Room as we were getting near to the X-Rays and I was in no way letting her go wandering off….she would never find her way back.

Protesting, I frog-marched her through security, which, due to us wearing leathers and carrying crash helmets, turned out to be a protracted affair involving many bleeps. And up to the gate area. I finally allowed her to use the loo and after accusing me of being a stress-case she disappeared into the loo for so long that I considered going in to see where the blazes she was as the PA was sending agitated messages about people who need to get the fudge on the plane.

She emerged in a truculent mood, I don’t think she approved of the soap in the dispensers and that made her want to rebel by walking very slowly but I got her through the gate, down the stairs, out onto the tarmac and up into the a/c a few seconds before they shut the doors.

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Phew! I could relax, or so I thought but within seconds of my attention wandering off she was getting very upset with the air-con vent above her seat and demanding to know why it had been glued shut but with a manly twist of the wrist I got the thing open and she nearly calmed down but a woman in an unfortunate cardigan caught her eye and she started proclaiming the deficiencies of the woman’s dress sense in a voice rather too loud for comfort so I pointed out the article in the Air NZ magazine about where in Singapore Drags Queens from Ponsonby can go to buy sequins.

It was a momentary distraction but an older FA with a Lesbian haircut hove into view, which set her off again and short of taping her mouth shut or just killing her, there wasn’t a lot I could do to shut her the fudge up…..the alleged coffee, although short on quality was obviously well laced with caffeine and she was starting the rev up at the mouth.

Then she stared at the drop down TV monitors in the overhead and listened to Motocade signing “Holy Moly” for a few seconds, her jaw dropped in disbelief…”What’s that crap? I hope they aren’t going to play that sort of shite all the way to Dunedin...I don’t want to listen to POP MUSIC!!!”

The last two words uttered as a Memsahib in the days of the Raj would have uttered Leprosy…or some other vile disease that only afflicted fuzzy-wuzzys’.

The crazy Air NZ safety video, featuring Rugby Players and a 70 year old streaking granny managed to engage her for long enough for me to apologise to the FAs and the Captain…the First Officer wouldn’t even make eye contact…

I had given her the window seat as a means of distracting her from the multitude of fashion faux-pa’s, bad hair days and the culinary disaster that is short-haul breakfast…although she had berated me for buying breakfast when I must have known it would be free on the plane but no sooner had the words “Lemon Muffin or Apricot Danish” passed my lips than she acknowledged my superior experience in these matters and noted that if it was airline food and I wouldn’t eat it then it really had to be dire…probably as bad as a Kosher Buffet at Passover.

To pass the time Mrs J had popped into Whitcouls and bought an Art magazine…or more correctly bought a plastic bag containing 3 Australian Art magazines for $9.99, during the North Island sector of the flight she proceeded to read them and complain bitterly (and loudly) about the appalling “art” showcased within the pages, declaring most of the proudly displayed works to be “insipid” “frighteningly devoid of taste” and other such insights.

I explained to her, as one might a retarded child, that a: 3 magazines for $9.99 was exceedingly cheap and one might therefore get what one paid for and b: The Australians are an uncultured race and one is bound to be disappointed if one expects their “art” to show any trace of culture or breeding, unless it was indigenous art.

She agreed (I had to write this momentous event on my T Shirt so I could put it my diary later) and ventured that the magazines had been wrapped in plastic to ensure nobody browsed through them and discovered what appalling tripe they were, prior to purchase.

The woman next to us was either having an orgasm or trying not to laugh out loud… I declined to ask her which as she had her iPod switched on and wouldn’t have heard me.

The coffee got a character assassination but was consumed anyway, along with a handful of paracetamol in preparation for the awful pains in her ears she gets when landing…at least it would give her an insight into why men choose to go deaf shortly after retirement….

Over the South Island I pointed out various sights and mentioned that at a lunch recently she had been mistaken when telling her Ho’s that she had never been to the South Island before as she had been to Nelson and it was immediately below us.

“Really?” she looked at me like a cow might on being told that Santa Claus doesn’t exist…”I thought it was just south of Hamilton…about half way to Wellington” (grab a map of NZ boys and girls to truly appreciate the blondness of that statement).

I bit my knuckles and started to point out other landmarks, being careful to keep her updated on our progress using the map in the flight magazine.

The views were stunning and I kept up my geographical tour of NZ until about Timaru, where she was just blown away by braided rivers and vowed to do some art about them but then we started the descent and her head felt like it was going to explode.

She chewed gum and I did the reflexology hand massage that makes it almost bearable but this was a bad one, she screwed her big brown eyes up and cried until her makeup ran. She looked all vulnerable, curled up in seat 22F in agony, writhing like a bored toddler and rocking like a retarded ape, crying and trying ever so hard to be brave….

Just when she really did think her head was going to explode, her left ear, the one that gives her the worst pain, decided enough was enough and with a squeak that only she could hear it released some pressure and she knew that her silk scarf was safe for another day.

The lower we went, the better she got until she was well enough to berate me for suggesting that the trees below us were Manuka…she couldn’t tell me what they were, only that I was wrong.

This was a relief, it meant she was fully recovered and as we swayed through the low-level turbulence I knew everything was right in the world once more.

Our friends met us at the gate and now there was enough that was new to her to keep the heat off me for at least 5 days…you know what? I do believe there really is a God ;)

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