It’s all been downhill since Concorde |
Half a century ago today, the Duke of Kent, Anthony Hopkins and 97 other diners had a meal of caviar and lobster canapés followed by grilled steak, all washed down with Dom Perignon. There was nothing too unusual about this slightly ostentatious menu, one that was a typical example of 1970s British fine dining. But it was a lunch that cost more than £1 billion to serve up. It was the first meal on board the very first scheduled flight on Concorde – the plane that, for close to three decades, made it possible to have breakfast in Belgravia, a meeting in Manhattan and still be home for supper in Soho.
That’s not a schedule that appeals to me (there’s nowhere decent to eat of a morning in Belgravia). But thinking of Concorde, 50 years on from it going supersonic on its first flight to Bahrain, is one of the few elements of the past which trigger a deep and irritable jealousy.
I’ve worked as a travel journalist for the past 20 years and, in that time, I’ve been lucky enough to have secured more than my fair share of complimentary flights, many of them in the relative sanctuary of business class. But I’ve also taken hundreds and hundreds of economy flights. Even on so-called legacy carriers, I’m hardly........