Cabin Baggage - the Third Law

Imagine wearing pyjamas made from the business section of the Mail on Sunday, soaked in cold urine, while trying to sleep under a duvet made of quilted kippers. Or having your face pushed into mouldy porridge while a failed first-year arts student, drunk, tries to tattoo a Google map of Ballymena's historic quarter onto your left buttock. Or, worse, being forced at gunpoint to skip using the entrails of your recently slaughtered pet dog, while your assailant hums the entire Nolan Sisters back catalogue, before blasting your genitalia with both barrels of a sawn-off shotgun. An almost priceless Purdey shotgun that, ten minutes previously, was a family heirloom and its original length.

If you can hold those three images in your head simultaneously, then you have an approximation of how unpleasant flying has now become.

But I'm not here to whinge, dear reader.

I will let others complain about the fact that the cost of flying has been stable for some years now, so that the term 'low-cost' is now a marketing lie, or that a ticket advertised at £1 becomes £50 by the time you get to the end of the process, or that you can't sleep on a flight now because you are being 'marketed-to' for the entire duration, or that airline staff are getting thinner on the ground and hate you, that you have to pay the airport just to pick someone up in your car, that parking charges are extortionate, that airport concessions charge you double the normal rate ('as a concession') and the smile on the face of airport management is as sincere as a Bernie Madoff IOU.

I am simply here to state Mitchell's 3^rd Law of Cabin Baggage Size Restriction Recommendations (laws 1 and 2 being debunked in a peer-reviewed journal owing to statistical anomalies in my Hertz-Lugwiggenstein canonical redundancy regression algorithm).

And that law is, “Don't take anything on board the plane that you can't have shoved comfortably up your ass by a member of airline or airport staff”.

So the next time someone tells you the airline just 'lost their luggage', just nod and smile because you know, and they know you know, where it really went......