Anything but KQ.

One day, it remains unclear whether that day will arrive courtesy of a successful award of the Mombasa county uji tender or whether it will be because my spectacularly un-Christian-like behaviour has had a road-to-Damascus transfiguration, I shall partake of a first-class ticket - or an upgrade to first-class bourgeois status. For the foreseeable future, though, I shall remain a loyal passenger of the cattle class section, of which, never mind the neocolonial overtones, I have found Qantas to be the best - and KQ to be the absolute horrid worst. (KLM, despite its aging fleet, is miles better than KQ.)

It is five hours to Johannesburg's OR Tambo International from JKIA - and it is five hours to Accra's Kotoka International. Both, when I made the fateful decision to temporarily depart from my beloved Green City in the Sun, are served by the KQ workhorse - the Boeing 737. It's configuration remains a mystery. Those five hours, whether it were to Jo'burg or Accra, were the worst five hours in any form of public conveyance I have ever experienced. Noisy. Smelly. And, believe you me, roach-infested. Roaches!

The food, and I cannot emphasize this enough, had the texture and consistency of vulcanized rubber. (Those of a certain vintage remember playing "bladder" - or watching the girls they were sweet on playing "bladder" and will surely remember chewing on a piece of that black stuff. They will also remember the taste with cringe-inducing vividness.) That, my friends, is what cattle-class catering on KQ feels like - with a side helping of salt and a condiment of unknown provenance.

I wouldn't mind the food so much if it were not for the legroom - or lack of it. (After all, I survived six years of gastro-experimentation in the World's Largest Democracy with enthusiasm so rubber-chicken diners are neither her or there.) But for the ten billion shillings' hole in its books you would think that at the swingeing prices that KQ charges for its seats they would have adequate legroom for a man of my miniature stature. Alas, dear reader, you would be most assuredly wrong. If the architects of the Wrack and the Wheel, employed with religious zeal by the authors of the Spanish Inquisition, had had access to KQ's B737 fleet, I believe the confessions they sought with ISIS-like ruthlessness would have been readily to hand for which no blood would have been spilled or bones broken.

Sitting for an hour in a cattle-class KQ B737 seat is an exercise in endurance that I fear must cause catastrophic orthopaedic damage to those who are even an inch taller than I am. I contrast this to the relative plushness of the eight-hour KLM B737 flight between Schiphol and Dulles, and the positively regal thirteen-hour Qantas B747 flight - in row 47D right next to the tail generator no less - between Jo'burg and Sydney. (And when you sit in the non-tycoon portions of the snooty, hostile OR Tambo International or the spectacularly please-come-back-again cattle-class where-are-the-airport-staff sections of Schiphol, you curse the fact that we have a "national carrier" that treats the vast majority of its "nationals" as cattle even before they board.)

If I believed even for a second that KQ would improve, I would hit the delete button and wait for that day to arrive. There was a glimmer of hope with the Embraer fleet. That hope has since been snuffed out. I will, wherever a choice is offered, avoid-like-the-plague our national carrier in favour of a complete stranger - like KLM, Qantas or the efficiently German Lufthansa.