I miss the air travel. I miss business travel. There was a time when I would look up in the sky and see the vapour trail of a barely visible plane and thank God I was not on it. Back then, I used to fly around 150 days a year – mainly for work. Aeroplanes were like taxis, ferrying me to Frankfurt or Hong Kong or LA. I notched up half a million air miles with British Airways – which allowed me to fly even more – and even wrote a column for its in- flight magazine Business Life. A large part of my life was spent up in the air, literally.
Flight takes you away. And parting is such sweet sorrow. On the one hand, I was leaving my little family behind and whilst that isn’t too terrible on short haul excursions, it was painful for the sort of three week extravaganzas I had when we lived on the Western tip of Cornwall and I earned my living as a consultant in far flung locations. On the other hand, it is always easier for the departing for they have exciting adventures ahead of them whilst those left behind just have ordinary existence with which to entertain themselves.
In my heady days working for the advertising group Omnicom (2000-2007), a Gold BA Executive Club card came with the job. Before that, I had only worked in London agencies with predominantly domestic clients, so air travel was rare other than for the odd flight to Dublin or European HQ in Paris (before Eurostar) or for family holidays. I did once fly to New Zealand on a TV commercial shoot for Irn Bru where the client insisted on attending and, as the Account Manager on the business, I was forced to go in order to keep the client away from the film crew so he couldn’t interfere. Luckily, he got bad sun stroke on day 1 and was in bed for the next 8 days, so I got to go diving with dolphins, whale watching and exploring whilst he nursed his beetroot coloured face in his bedroom. And there was a nice car shoot in Nice, a speech in Helsinki. And a training course in Chicago. But apart from that, it was mainly road trips up the M1 to Luton or flights to Manchester and Edinburgh. Nice, but no cigar.
The cigars started in earnest when I started at Omnicom. On day 3 of my new job I was flown to NYC for the annual Omnicom golf day at a country club in Connecticut. At Heathrow, I deposited my car at valet parking – your PA pre-books, you drop the keys off at a special location and walk into the terminal. When you arrive back, your car is waiting and you drive off home. I made my way to the Gold Executive Club checkin (there is only one run higher and that is First Class and Concorde), waltzed through Fast Track security to the Executive Lounge and tucked in to the free booze and newspapers. When we were called to our gate, I enjoyed the thrill of turning left onto the plane – Business class. In my seat, always window (BA log your preferences) I was offered Champagne and I settled in to my entertainment. I felt like Hunker Munker in Beatrix Potter’s tale Two bad mice, like a house breaker who shouldn’t be there carried away with excitement at the prospect of all this luxury.
At JFK we were picked up in a Lincoln, the sort of plush American automobile they use for executive chauffeuring Stateside, by a besuited Omnicom driver. Mineral water in the back, padded leather seats and aircon.
A drive into Manhattan and the New York Palace Hotel in Midtown. Forty stories of Madison Avenue Mad Men living beckoned as the huge doorman opened our car door and bellowed “Welcome to the New York Palace, gentlemen”, for which he palmed a $5 tip from my colleague. I love New York, I remember thinking. It was like plugging yourself into the mains electricity – a charge of raw voltage you get nowhere else on Earth. Check in and then the express elevator to the thirty second floor. The suite was huge. You could have landed a plane in it. Two double beds. Window overlooking Rockerfeller Plaza and the skyscrapers of the City with a marbled bathroom and plush carpet. I had clearly arrived.
The day before the golf day we had a Board meeting in the Omnicom boardroom. The furniture was all French polished wood and dark mahogany – what passes in corporate America for classy. The chairs looked like they had been inflated by an overenthusiastic body builder – they were so plush that my feet literally didn’t touch the ground. It was like being back at school on your first day when your uniform is two sizes too big and so is everything else. Before the meeting, my British colleague took me to Delmonico’s down the road from the hotel for a foil wrapped bagel with cream cheese and bacon, a gourmet coffee and a fresh juice. It was a proper American breakfast. I returned to my room with it and devoured it, revelling in the executive lifestyle that was now so clearly mine.
The following day we were ferried up to Westchester Country Club for the golf tournament. A lot of WASP men smoking stogies vied for the attentions of the CEO, whose club this was. It was the nearest thing I can imagine to what it must be like in Hollywood when you go to a party and people are curious to know who you are – you’re a fresh face after all – and then drop you the moment they find out you’re not important at all. A few people turned their back on me that day. That’s ok. I remember who they were. That kind of information always comes back to be helpful.
And so on. NYC was a regular trip. I must have travelled there forty times. Twice a year we took our roadshow to Milan, Paris, Madrid, Amsterdam, Munich, Brussels and Frankfurt, always first class travel in a first class way. But turning left at the gangplank got serious when I started travelling for Caffeine, the business consultancy I started with Chris Cowpe and Andy Milligan in 2007. My first gig was Cambodia. Then Singapore, Hong Kong, Tokyo, Goa, Cape Town and Jo’burg, Shanghai, NYC, LA, Atlanta, Milwaukee, Istanbul, Bahrain, Dubai, Jeddah, Beirut, Bangkok and Macau. It was heady.
Always the client forked out for business class travel and turning left became a lifestyle. A lovely lifestyle. I got used to metal cutlery and linen napkins, to Wedgewood China and smiling service. I got blase about comparing the standards and expressing a preference for Singapore Airlines over Cathay or Virgin over BA. I caught up on films with the in flight entertainment as I drank fine Bordeaux or Rioja and ate my rare steak. I never said no to a top up. It never lost its thrill but it didn’t do to show too much excitement. It became my right. My just desert (and the desserts were good, followed by a little cheese).
This way of travelling became the norm. But even by these standards, the iconic BA001 flight was exceptional. In 2020, BA retired its all business class flight to NYC on the A318. I flew this route just once, one way, but it was magnificent. Flying from City airport in London, you fly to Shannon in Ireland where the plane refuels and you go through US customs so that you arrive in NYC as a domestic flight. This saves oodles of time in immigration as the line in Shannon isn’t quite as long as in JFK. I flew the Westbound leg in 2012 and even got to sit in the pilot’s seat and wear his cap – an impossible feat in today’s air security conscious world.
Turning left is habit forming. There was an old ‘suit’ in the legendary agency Collett Dickenson Pearce called Nigel Clarke who only ever turned left. God alone knows what his driving was like. I got the habit. But those days are gone. Of course, there are other ways to fly, when flying returns. Private jets are a different proposition altogether and I do know a couple of people who indulge this luxury. They are both utter dickheads. And easyjet pioneered the era of very cheap air travel, with none of the bells and whistles I like. When the dot com bubble burst and all the jet setting, high fallutin’ travel junkets changed, the Omnicom CFO issued a memo inviting people to sit at the back of the plane in economy. “If I’m on the plane, you’ll definitely be more comfortable there”, he wrote, menacingly. We obliged. It was a foretaste of what was to come with the crash of 2008, but no one saw the near terminal Covid effect on flight coming. Flight will return, but it will likely as not never return to the excesses of frequency (taxi service) and take-it-all-for-granted luxury that I enjoyed. So I raise my Martini and drink to ‘Turning left’ – one of the nicest, if not the only, ways to travel.