News reaches this correspondent not via the usual channels of officialdom but through the shattered glass of a tonic bottle and a garbled telegram from a parrot that once belonged to a disgraced air marshal. It appears that while Britain's airline moguls were busy ironing their moustaches and polishing their gold-plated boarding ladders, a rather significant mishap has occurred over the Dorking bypass. A jumbo jet, filled to the gills with 400 souls each clutching a duty-free Toblerone and a dream, has apparently lost its argument with the local geography.
The wreckage, however, is not the main story. The main story, my furious and gin-addled friends, is that no one in a position of authority seems terribly bothered about the corpses. British airlines, those bastions of customer service that once managed to lose a duchess’s Labrador for three weeks, are now demanding something called 'global rescue transparency'.
This is code, I suspect, for 'we've lost the plane and we need someone to blame'. Let us dissect this farce, if we can keep down our breakfast. The crash, as reported by a dazed man in a smoking jacket who claims to have seen the whole thing from his hot air balloon, occurred at the precise moment when the pilot was likely being told to turn left at the next roundabout.
The government, meanwhile, is holding a press conference with a man who looks like a ventriloquist's dummy after a bad night out. He says 'thoughts and prayers' with the sincerity of a man who has just discovered his wallet is missing. But the real villains, the clowns in pinstripes, are the airline bosses.
They sit in their boardrooms, surrounded by charts showing 'passenger flow optimisation' and 'revenue enhancement strategies', and they wring their hands not over the dead but over the dent in their share price. These are the same people who charge you £20 for a sandwich that tastes of polystyrene and regret. And now they want transparency.
I have a transparency for them. It is the ghost of every missing luggage claim, every delayed flight, every overbooked seat. It is the spectre of a system that values profit over people.
As for the rescue, the official line is that teams are 'working diligently' which means they have sent a memo to the appropriate department and are now waiting for a reply. The families of the forgotten are hysterical, and rightly so. They have been put on hold.
They have been told to check the website. They have been offered a complimentary voucher for a future flight. It is a disgrace of monumental proportions.
This correspondent will not rest until the truth is known. Or until the bar closes. Whichever comes first.
