Then the plane back from Lyon in 1979 had to be de-iced three times. At first he had noticed only that everyone in the departure lounge was driving him to distraction (Katie practicing handstands, Jean going to the duty-free shop after their gate number had been called, the young man opposite stroking his excessively long hair as if it were some kind of tame creature…). And when they boarded, something in the cloistered, chemical air of the cabin itself had made his chest feel tight. But only when they were taxiing to the runway did he realize that the plane was going to suffer some catastrophic mechanical failure mid-flight and that he was going to cartwheel earthward for several minutes inside a large steel tube with two hundred strangers who were crying and soiling themselves, then die in a tangerine fireball of twisted steel.

He remembered Katie saying, “Mum, I think there’s something wrong with Dad,” but she seemed to be calling faintly from a tiny disk of sunlight at the top of a very deep well into which he had fallen.

He stared doggedly at the seat back in front of him trying desperately to pretend that he was sitting in the living room at home. But every few minutes he would hear a sinister chime and see a little red light flashing in the bulkhead to his right, secretly informing the cabin crew that the pilot was wrestling with some fatal malfunction in the cockpit.

It was not that he could not speak, more that speaking was something which happened in another world of which he had only the vaguest memory.

At some point Jamie looked out of the window and said, “I think the wing’s coming off.” Jean hissed, “For God’s sake, grow up,” and George actually felt the rivets blowing and the fuselage dropping like a ton of hardcore.

For several weeks afterward he was unable to see a plane overhead without feeling angry.

It was a natural reaction. Human beings were not meant to be sealed into tins and fired through the sky by fan-assisted rockets.