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The worst part of leaving Adelaide was the fact that, because I am a cheap bastard, I keep booking flights on Jetstar.


Jetstar is awful. More to the point, Jetstar is deliberately awful. They make the conditions of your flight as terrible as they possibly can, so that they can then upsell you on food, drinks, better seats and entertainment systems… anything to distract you from the fact that you’ve been shoehorned into a narrow seat which is surrounded by other narrow seats on all sides, all of which are full of people who are far too wide for such narrow seats.


The woman next to me tried to make the best of a bad situation and do some work on her laptop, but when the man in front of her put his seat back it pushed the screen down so that she couldn’t see it. That’s how close together the seats are. For myself, I found a way to get through the ordeal when I realised that I had a packet of Mentos in my pocket. I further realised that if I divided the flight time by the number of Mentos in the packet, I could have a Mentos every 18 minutes. It broke the prospect of a hellish three hour flight into more manageable chunks.


So every 18 minutes or so I distracted myself by sucking on a fresh mentos, a tastier equivalent of a prisoner scratching a mark on the wall for each day he’s incarcerated, and spent the rest of the time reading an old John Irvine novel on my Kindle that my book club discussed months ago but I never finished.