3am

I won’t lie to you – I was feeling a little under the weather after my pie eating contest with Ian Devine. While he was out organising a super-heavyweight limbo dancing contest with the contingent of sumo wrestlers in Business Class I was sat back in my first class seat utterly unable to move. Every attempt to stand was met with waves of pain. The smell of gently singeing nylon coming from my under garments told me I needed to get to the convenience but try as I might I simply could not get up. I tried imagining a camera script had been left on the seat in front of me but I found no joy. Not even a camera script with a rare signature like that of Jack Pitt or Pepi Borza. I tried pretending that someone at the front of the first class compartment was asking for people to sign a petition banning the public sale of “Doctor Who” video cassettes or digital versatile discs because such material should remain in the exclusive possession of sensible men who have spent a lifetime collecting it on the black market rather than simply walking down to Woolworths and handing over a few pounds to a greasy youth who calls you “granddad”. Alas I couldn’t move so much as a leg in the pursuit of this noble but entirely fictional cause. I even tried convincing myself that I was sat not on a fur covered first class seat but on a naked and oiled up h-o-m-o-s-e-x-u-a-l called Guy. Even that didn’t get me to my feet. I was, in short, as bloated as the whale that swallowed Ian Devine (in a witty piece of biblical fan fiction which I wrote during my brief radical Islamic phase).

I was in more or less constant pain when I heard the familiar sound of coins being dropped.

“Finders keepers” shouted Ian Devine and a scramble began to collect what sounded like a reasonable sum in loose change. I lurched forward, more in mind than body, and got nowhere rather quickly. Half of me wished I could just violently throw up – it wouldn’t be very pleasant for Miss Mifflin (or whichever hired hand had to clear it up) or indeed for the glamorous nun sat in front of me but it would give me back my mobility. My plight was exactly the same as that of “The Doctor” during the seventh broadcasting block of “Doctor Who”. There is literally no difference between his lack of Tardis and my stomach being crammed full of pies.

Before my gastric acids could do their job the glamorous nun had grabbed most of the loose change (shedding a good few sequins from her habit in the process) and announced in vague terms that she would give some of it to the less well off. I didn’t believe her for a moment.

“Mr Brent” called Miss Mifflin as I was deep in thought over the greed of the modern nun, “I am having a problem with my suspender and wondered if you would come and help me secure my stocking?”

I tried to get up – by Patrick I tried to get up – but the more I struggled the more the huge reservoir of pies in my stomach formed a giant and intractable lump. I felt as if I had swallowed a cannon ball. Miss Mifflin looked so helpless with her leg up on the arm of Ian Devine’s left seat and her smart, airline issued skirt hitched around her waist. I struggled against the cruel mass of slowly digesting pies but try as I might I was unable to come to her aid.

“Allow me, Miss Mifflin” said Ian Devine as he placed a chubby finger on her stocking top. She gratefully secured the silk stocking with a safety pin and rolled down her skirt.

“Thank you, Mr Devine” she said. Ian Devine beamed like a cat who had not only drunk all the cream but had helped himself to a quick fondle of the farmer’s reasonably attractive daughter. I only wanted to assist her because I am a gentleman and that is what gentlemen do when they find a lady in distress. Ian Devine is just a common letch – the sort of low life beast who would violate Miss Bobbins’ privacy by drilling a second hole in her bedroom wall. Disgusting.

Over the next 45 minutes I was forced to sit in my first class chair and miss seeing Ian Devine defeat the entire Japanese sumo contingent by successfully limboing under a bar a mere five feet nine and three quarter inches from the ground, the glamorous nun getting her comeuppance when a cocktail cherry went down the wrong way and a female passenger had to give her artificial respiration with a decidedly l-e-s-b-i-a-n flavour and Miss Mifflin’s other suspender snapping due to what I can only guess was the plane flying at greater than normal altitude.

Then it began. Like Mount St Helens (the once popular volcano in the United States of America) the warning signs were there for all to see, hear and smell. At first there was a rumbling. Then came a series of gas eruptions which bubbled rather due to the build up of seepage in my under garments caused by Dr Flapjack’s unguent. Then my stomach started to bulge as though I were about to give birth to an alien from the motion picture “Alien”.

“Are you all right, Dennis Brent?” asked Ian Devine, taking a moment out from basking in his limbo glory.

“I feel…” I began, “I feel…”

“You’re doing a lot of feeling, Dennis Brent” he said.

“Tell him to put a blanket over his lap” called Miss Mifflin.

“I… I…” I croaked pathetically before erupting.