Do you have a fear of flying? Joanne McCarthy explains hers, from a new perspective

He heaved himself up. He was wearing cargo pants with a fake army fatigue motif and a Bintang singlet. His frame was bulldog-like. He had a bowling ball head with what appeared to be a number two haircut, a neck that seemed to have retracted into his shoulders while he sat, huge arms and legs, and all within a short and very broad package.

He manoeuvred himself out of his seat and struggled to reach me, standing a metre or so away. I tried to look impassive, supportive even, but the urge to scream was too great. I think I winced instead, like someone preparing for pain.

He finally stood beside me, slightly puffed from the effort of squeezing his stout body through a narrow space on an angle, while the queue of resigned people waiting for us to get our act together watched.

"Which seat is yours, because I think the middle seat is mine," I said, prompting him to pat himself down while the resigned look on the faces of the waiting people turned to something close to annoyance, with a hint of outright anger from one woman.

Dear God that I don't believe in, I thought. Please help me now. GIVE THIS MAN A BRAIN.

For that is the point you reach when you get on a plane and humanity in all its wild, weird and wonderful variations is thrust at you, beside you, around you and sometimes draped slobbering and snoring over you, while time hangs as suspended as the plane you're in. You want to run screaming from the scene but you can't because you need to get from A to B more.

On the plane only a week or so ago the bloke with the faded tattoo had taken up the middle seat in the hope that he'd have the two beside him. Or at least that's what I think he was doing. He never actually said. But his plan, if that was what it was, came unstuck because the plane was full, he had the window seat and I was in the middle. The aisle seat hadn't been claimed but the claimant was somewhere in the line of increasingly irritated people waiting for us to move. I asked old mate if he wanted the middle seat because I was happy to swap. He blinked but said nothing, shoved his ticket back in his pocket and heaved his way to the window seat, pulling on the seats ahead of him as he went. Whiplash for three who paid us back later by tilting their seats right back the second the seatbelt sign went off. Sigh.

I don't know why faded tatts man had to get up and make his way to the aisle to work out where he wanted to sit. But he did, and left me pulling apologetic faces to the people in the queue.

I don't know whether tatts man's bodily encroachments into my confined piece of plane real estate - his massive arm and elbow hanging way over the armrest and his massive leg taking up about a quarter of my leg space - were deliberate or not. It was like sitting next to a particularly docile bull - extremely large and vaguely threatening at first with his non-verbal communication skills, but ultimately harmless.

I thought about nudging his arm and leg back into his plane space, the way I once used my body to push into a cow's side when it refused all attempts to get off a quiet country road. But I didn't in the end. Once you're squashed in a plane in an economy seat for a relatively short domestic flight it's best to adopt an apathetic bovine attitude to get through. And a report to the pilot about a fight over a man's elbow doesn't sound like it would end well for all parties.

But the elbow and knee were annoying. I just want to put that on the record.

When the man in the aisle seat arrived I took one look at him and tried to smile but it was beyond me. He was pleasant, but not small. I was the squished tomato in that vaguely damp, overly warm altitude sandwich. When the non-tattooed bloke started snoring, my martyrdom was complete.

Plane travel is a bit like eating crabs or going to New Year's Eve parties. They all sound good in theory, but too often you're left stinking like fish or bored out of your brain and watching while the minutes drag by.

I have a book sitting beside me that I bought at Sydney airport in December before a flight to Perth. Sometimes a plane trip can pass and the worst that happens is the pasta in the Tuscan lamb is soft. Then there's trips like the flight to Perth.

The book is exhibit A if ever I'm required to provide evidence I survived the ultimate flight from hell. The trip was so miserable I lost all interest in reading the book, and started listing all the crap things that happened on the back inside cover, starting with "Plane late by 1 hour 45 minutes".

I don't have the space to list everything that happened in those five lousy hours in the air. But a top 10 crap things would include a sanctioned seat swap at the start before take-off that whisked my pleasant middle-aged woman aisle-seat neighbour away (and yes, I had the middle seat, AGAIN), and replaced her with a screeching toddler and an ineffectual father who had clearly surrendered to his son's demands while the child was in utero.

I have my book notes to thank for this verbatim account of what the father said to his child, in a slightly whiney voice, as the child yelled and squirmed, hit the person in front in the head, kicked me twice, and made everyone think murderous thoughts, although I tried to direct as much of those thoughts as I could towards the father.

"Why do you keep kicking me? Come on. Sit down for awhile. Why won't this stupid phone work? Why won't the movie come on?" he said, repeatedly, while junior did his best Spawn of Satan impression. 

I could go on and on about what the kid did and didn't do, including screaming and hitting a steward who tried to get him off the floor and into a seatbelt for take-off, but I won't. Just imagine everything awful a kid can do - from all orifices - and picture it happening 10 centimetres away. For FIVE HOURS. When we landed it was dark and raining and my car was ages away. But I walked every step.