Sit six at any dinner table and it's not long before we're boring each other with pet airline stories.
The diner who starts us on airlines should be sent home without their pudding. It's like releasing an infected rat down a gangplank.
Plague follows, because we can all inflict at least three "must tell" airline experiences.
We prate on about lost bags, air points, and the lone biscuit which is now the domestic airline meal.
I'm as bad as you. I've been telling my number one airline yarn for 35 years, though to be fair it's a ripsnorter. And as I'm not at your table, and you've only now heard how I once sat beside Greg Norman's caddy ...
Back in the grim days of Communist Russia, I once flew with chooks by Aeroflot Yak from Moscow to Baku. You read that correctly. Chooks, Baku, Yak, Aeroflot.
My Soviet air experience had been kicked off in Aeroflot's surliest tradition, departing spectacularly late from Singapore. Around 2am they delivered a meal that appeared to be corned beef and potatoes. "Wine?" I asked. Someone shrugged, plonked down a mug of vodka, and left me to self-administer.
I drifted off to sleep, then panic struck. I was being thrown violently around the aircraft. There were bumps, loud noises, and I smelled an intrusive mix of cabbage and raw aviation spirit. With death near, I awoke gazing through the darkness into a face fit to guard the gates of hell. It eyeballed me, breathing sufficient fumes to launch a sputnik.
Comrade hostess stopped shaking my shoulder. "Wake - you will have breakfast," she ordered. The comrade dumped another plate of corned beef and potatoes with vodka, and strode off to goad the other prisoners.
There was no sexist recruitment of smile-prone Barbie dolls with Air Soviet. If you were Party, the perk was yours.
The friendly masses of the Soviet Union had invited my newspaper to write a series on the great magnificence of three spots.
Baku, an unsightly dump surrounded by Caspian oil slicks and chugging derricks.
Tbilisi - picturesque, and further improved when they tore down their Joe Stalin monument. And Yerevan, which was interesting enough, but stuffed with bitter Armenians.
With the job half done, I sat puzzled in the Very Important Comrades lounge of Moscow airport. "Why have I really been brought here?" It made no sense as then it was near impossible for any tourist to reach these places.
It was a day of extremes. Outside it was raining cats, dogs and maybe bison. Inside, the comfortable VIC lounge (I forget its real name) had a caviar and vodka irrigation system that would embarrass the tsars. I waited with my three accompanying Soviet suits, one an idealogue KGB woman whose day I'd ruined by explaining that back home our proletariat was saving up for swimming pools.
Eventually, airport workers with umbrellas came to escort us across the tarmac to a distant aircraft. A Soviet guard stood at the bottom of its steps holding back about 30 sodden citizens who'd stood shivering through the rainstorm, not permitted to board ahead of the Very Important Comrades. They were Azerbaijani Soviets - wiry, dark skinned people in soaked and shabby clothing, heading home to Baku.
As we climbed the stairs they began to hiss with sibilant hatred, no lips moving, no individual's insult detectable to the guard.
Then, with the suits ensconced, the peasantry were allowed to blunder aboard, dragging cages of wet hens. The flight to Baku carried more chooks than passengers.
Our Yak 40 aircraft was a sort of bus with propellers, created by a body called the Soviet Design Bureau. It bucked and bumped towards Baku, the occasional wails of terrified passengers drowned by the chooks, who seemed to be demanding seat upgrades.
We eventually arrived and an official held back the peasants, while the Soviet Princes and I disembarked.
They hissed again, and while you couldn't help but feel ashamed, the comrades didn't notice. I think this was the moment I knew I was visiting both a nation and an idea that was doomed. The Soviet Union lasted 14 years beyond this small airline story, but never deserved any of them.
And did my hosts have another agenda?
Look, it took me years to decide I'd understood the whys of some strange things that happened - the Soviet Union was that sort of place. I don't write about them, because any sane person will think I made them up.
• John Lapsley is an Arrowtown writer.
