Exhibit A

Something weird happened to me last Wednesday and I’m going to try to write about it, even if I’m not yet sure I’ll be able to find the right words to describe it.

I was life-modelling in an achingly hipster studio/warehouse in Hackney Wick. With the exception of a hen party two weekends ago (which I’ll cover in a future blog post), it was the first time I’d done anything like that for about 10 years – and it was only when I got on the Overground half an hour before the class was due to start that I decided I definitely wasn’t going to chicken out.

Building yourself up to do something scary is often a lot worse than actually taking the plunge and doing it, so once I’d arrived and taken off my clothes I started to feel pretty calm about things; not exactly in my comfort zone, but certainly not so far outside it that I couldn’t relax a bit and enjoy myself.

I don’t like my teeth. I’ve never liked my teeth. The front ones are too big at the top and too small at the bottom. They crowd my mouth and overlap in unattractive ways. They’re just a bit of a mess.

It’s my own fault too. In my early teens the orthodontist gave me a heavy-duty set of dental braces and told me to wear them every night. I knew that it was a precursor to having a daytime set and – scared of being bullied at school – stubbornly refused to play ball. I ‘lost’ the braces somewhere in my room. I skipped orthodontic appointments.

Perhaps assuming I’d come round to the idea further down the line, my parents shrugged their shoulders and left me to it. They’re not instinctively authoritarian anyway, and by that point I think they’d realised that when it comes to stuff like that I really am the proverbial horse, digging its heels in on the edge of the water.

I’m writing this post on a BA flight from Heathrow to Warsaw*. To one side of me is a taciturn, middle-aged Polish chap, his head buried in a book. It’s in English and he’s reading slowly, as if he’s puzzling over unfamiliar words. Across the aisle is a young American woman, maybe late 20s, with long blonde hair and a huge rock on her ring finger. She’s scribbling furiously on a stack of sales reports, pausing every now and then to swig from a bottle of Diet Coke.

I haven’t talked to either of them, nor will I. It’s early, for one thing, and I’m never at my best first thing in the morning; more importantly though, they both look like they want to be left in peace.

That’s not always the case. Flying does funny things to people, especially when they’re on their own. It’s such a transient activity – and so weirdly disconnected from everything that happens either side of it – that we often adjust our behaviours accordingly. We leave our everyday lives for a few hours and step into a bubble where no-one knows who we are or what we do. For all the seatbelts and safety announcements, the scheduled meals and regulated bathroom access, it’s one of the few times we’re able literally to rise above our troubles, and that can be a tremendously liberating experience.