Andrew Betts

As the second movie was coming to an end, I looked around the cabin, which was in darkness. In our section of the plane, I could see more than a hundred people, and all of them were asleep.

I stumbled from the plane in Singapore in a delirious half-awake-half-alive trance, to find one of the nicest airports I’d ever seen. Spotlessly clean, and an eerily calm atmosphere it seemed more like a shopping complex than an airport - nobody was in a hurry today. We had about four hours to kill until our next flight, so I found an information desk and asked whether there were any internet terminals available to transit passengers, which I seriously doubted. As I was to discover, Singapore’s airport is also one of the most well-appointed, having not only numerous internet terminals, but also a news/current affairs area worthy of a first class lounge, and, bizarrely, even a cactus garden. This was very unusual indeed - it was an outdoor area accessible by transit passengers, absolutely full of various species of weird and wonderful cacti. Making it even more odd was a yellow line painted down the centre of the tiny garden, on one side of which you could smoke. On the other side, you could not, but since the garden was no larger than the average living room, it didn’t really make a great deal of difference.

After stopping off in the food court for some much needed soup (the first food I’d had all day that was not served in a plastic box), we headed for the gate to continue our journey. The departure lounge was definitely the most uncomfortable part of the airport. Once I’d boarded the plane and been adequately informed of the location of the door through which I had just walked, I began the second phase of my jet-lag avoidance program - sleep. I had never been able to sleep on a plane before, so I came prepared: eye mask, earplugs, blanket, pillow, seat reclined.

I spent the following four hours entirely failing to go to sleep.

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