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these people away as well.
    How can anyone not know how putrid they smell? Worst still, he has no idea that he is offending everyone within a football field radius. Even if his own nasal passages are blocked or if he has become immune to his own stench, he can surely notice the look of distress on the faces of people around him?
    We can smell him even from the back galley – and guess who is in charge of that galley? Me, of course. I decide to take control of the situation.
    I give instructions, from a distance, for the man to go into the toilets and freshen up. He does not understand me. Frustrated at his noncompliance, I instruct him to move to the now vacant seat beside him. This he understands. I then unload every air-freshening spray and odour-killing chemical I can find on the aircraft into the area where he is sitting. I am surprised the man does not gag from toxic overload; he is still oblivious to what’s happening, however.
    I am reminded of an episode of ‘Seinfeld’, in which Jerry’s car is filled with the stink of B.O., thanks to a valet parking his car. Seinfeld refers to the odour as an ‘entity’: ‘Don’t you see what’s happening here? It’s attached itself to me! It’s alive! And it’s destroying the lives of everyone in its path. This is not just an odour – you need a priest to get rid of this thing. It’s a presence! It’s The Beast!’ Seinfeld cries in that episode The man’s B.O. is exactly that, an entity, and it has attached itself to the galley. I am sure that only an exorcism can save us from it now. I brew coffee and leave it uncovered on the bench in the hope the aroma will waft through the area and at least mask the man’s foul smell. It does not help. I even spray the area with my good Chanel Coco Mademoiselle perfume, but that does nothing to relieve us of the stink. It’s almost as if I’m trying to fight a bushfire with a glass of water.
    When flights are full it is often difficult to serve everyone efficiently, even when nothing goes wrong. In addition to moving about passengers as well as sanitising and deodorising, we have other things to deal with: a minor medical issue, wherein an elderly Japanese woman starts feeling faint; increasing turbulence; a woman, with a fear of flying, freaks out because of that turbulence; and one of the toilets breaks down.
    We go about fixing all this. The Japanese woman is placed on oxygen, and she feels better. However, we still need to monitor her at regular intervals. A couple of us pacify the woman with a fear of flying, and soon she is OK, but she will also need our constant reassurance and attention. It all adds to the workload. We lock-off the unserviceable toilet, but although the others are functional, losing one toilet on the flight proves to be a serious nuisance.
    However, the turbulence problem is not so easily fixed. In fact, it only breeds more problems for us. The persistent turbulence combined with the rancid body odour floating through the back of the cabin makes everyone feel uncomfortable, and extremely nauseous. One passenger throws up, followed by another, and yet another. It is a concertina effect. Now we have both body odor and vomit to contend with.
    With that one toilet out-of-action, the queue of nauseated people grows exponentially outside the few remaining working toilets. The turbulence continues, the man’s stench keeps floating in, and passengers keep getting sick. Some of the queuing passengers have sick bags in their hands already. Some of those bags are yet to be used. Some have already been used.
    In a cruel twist of fate, it is a mid-cabin toilet that is inoperable, leaving the majority of sick passengers queuing at the two toilets at the back of the aircraft – and that is exactly where the B.O. ‘entity’ has attached itself.
    One of the things that twenty years of being a hostie has taught me is to preempt situations.