In-flight entertainment.
It is usual for one to seek some form of amusement once you've been deprived of the use of your array of "electronic devices" as you yawn through the safety announcements beaming at you via the bulkhead console over your head.
And it is rare for any real stimulation to be found between the pages of the well-thumbed in-flight magazine. Isn't it?
However, I was resoundingly and most emphatically wrong on that count as it turns out.
Mango Airlines inflight rag, "Juice" (yeah, I know) just up and smacked me in the face with a full page Monsanto ad pronouncing the joys, benefits and empathetic approach this conglomerate adopts toward the planet and its impending cataclysmic annihilation if we don't genetically modify everything immediately.
Nature and/or god and/or the human species have no chance of survival, they claim, without Monsanto sweeping to the rescue on their white charger, sowing the seeds of (what?) redemption - or something.
The image of Monsanto on a horse or perhaps more than one horse just conjured up even more images of the 4 riders of the apocalypse - well at least three of them - pestilence, famine and death. All they really needed was to go into weapons production (and it can be argued that they already have) for War to mount that last spectral horse and they would have the proverbial full-house.
I took some "before" pictures of the ad with my iPod as a cunning plan (to paraphrase one Edmund Blackadder) took shape within that twisted cranium of mine.
Ten minutes later I had overwritten the entire ad with captions and responses for the benefit of the next occupier of seat 4C - just to offer a balanced perspective, you understand and then I moved through the magazine in my usual flip and skip style.
That is - until I saw the best article - maybe ever in the whole history of journalism.
I shit you not, fair folk - would I ever shit you? I mean, come on...
It was ostensibly about champagne, local production thereof and the difference between sparking wine and champagne. Which is all quite passé really - I mean, we've all been down that road before, yawn.
But there were illustrations of the various bottle capacities in the champagne industry - from the half bottle (which is cryptically called - well - a half bottle) all the way through the range, viz: Bottle (wow, that's adventurous too), the Magnum (two bottle capacity), the Jeroboam (4 bottles in one), the Rehoboam (6 bottles), the Methuselah (yep, 8 bottles), the Salmanazar (12 bottles) and finally, the Nebuchadnezzar containing a whopping 20 bottles worth of bubbly.
Why, you may ask, does a tee-totalling vegetarian have anything but a passing interest in effervescent alcoholic beverages?
Why indeed?
Well, that wasn't the pièce-de-résistance at all folks - no - it gets better.
The prospect of sitting in a local restaurant, my lovely and I and ordering a cheeky little Nebuchadnezzar of champers is almost too tempting to ignore, not that we would ever get such a thing right, of course.
But it would be worth chancing inebriation just for the thrill of cracking a 15 litre bottle of champagne, sampling it only to tell them that it wasn't to your taste and could they bring you another?
All that aside, what really riveted me in the article was the small segment on "the art of sabrage".
And what, pray tell, might that be? One would be inclined to ask. I did.
It is quite simple: it is the art of opening a champagne bottle using a sabre. And I don't mean lopping off the cork, no. This involves a manoeuvre whereby the sabre-wielder holds the bottle at a particular angle, having already dispensed with the foil and the wire basket.
And then he slides the blade of the sabre deftly up the neck of the bottle along one of the seams until it connects with the annulus (that would be the ridge at the neck where it flares to accommodate the cork).
And bugger me if the whole thing (neck and cork) doesn't just neatly cleave at that point separating bottle from top amid, I would imagine, a spurt or two of foaming wine.
I mean - isn't that just fucking brilliant!
Back to the local pizzeria for me and the wife with a hearty summons of the maître-d and the procurement of yet another cheeky little Nebuchadnezzar of his finest if you please.
This in and of itself would initiate a curdling within his bowels for starters.
"....wait just one moment, my good man," I will intone with a suitably haughty expression on my face, lips pursed in faux indignation as the designated waiter (or perchance the maître-d himself) commences work with the foil and basket atop the megalithic receptacle.
"Sabrage, please," I would command, arresting his hands from the easing of that cork from its tight little green tunnel.
"I'm sorry, sir?" he will no doubt splutter.
"Sabrage," I shall repeat. "Sabrage, my lad."
I fear at this stage, he shall gape at me open-mouthed, bereft of verbiage.
I know I would were the situation reversed and I was in ignorance of this antiquated practice.
And I shall leap to his rescue.
"I would like the bottle to be opened traditionally..."I would venture. Just enough to confuse him further.
"Sir?" he might rejoinder.
"Sabre, my lad. Get a sword and slice the top off the bottle. Sabrage, don't you know..." and I might just add a "what" for maximum pomposity as the situation would, you must agree, warrant.
"A sword?" he is likely to splutter. "Slice off the top with a sword?"
"Yeeeeeaaas" I will drawl like Jim Carrey at his final Pet Detective audition.
"Oh for heaven's sake!" I will explete. "What kind of establishment is this? No sooner have I got you stocking Magnums, Jeroboams and Nebuchadnezzars and you mean to now tell me that you don't have the means to expedite a traditional opening! Good lord!"
And then, as if by magic, I shall reach below the table and extract a handy sabre, procured that very morn at some emporium of suitable purveyance (on the never-never as it were).
"Allow me," I shall say, straddling the mighty bottle as a child might mount a hobby horse.
"Have at thee," I would yell and promptly decapitate the Nebuchadnezzar in one swift stroke, erupting a foamy spurt all over the hapless maître-d's best penguin suit.
And that would almost be that except for the fact that I would have him trickle some of the foaming liquid into a flute whereupon I would stare aghast into the glass and proclaim in a horrified tone: "We cannot drink this, man - there's a splinter of glass in it.... please bring us another bottle..."
At which point I may have to defend myself with aforementioned sabre ensuring that the maître-d doesn't get hold of it first and try his hand at decapitation for himself.
Ah - perchance to dream.
And that, my friends is what in-flight entertainment is all about.
Kudos to Mango for supplying it.
And now, it is almost time to drift off to the dulcet tones of Stephen Fry reciting some of Paperweight Volume 2 and then to Cape Town.
Excelsior.
