When the plane drops suddenly—engine failure, lightning strike, or something like that—I remain aloft, reclining in chilly air, staring at the space where, until recently, a vanilla movie had been scrolling away its undemanding fluff. I still think in imperial measures, so note that the Jumbo, already looking small against dust and blur, is accelerating at thirty-two feet per second, per second—a fact that means nothing to me but is reassuring nonetheless. Already I’ve forgotten both the movie’s title and its plot, but it was a recent rom-com starring Diane Keaton. There might have been a dog involved. By chilly, I mean minus sixty degrees Celsius or thereabouts, and I wonder why—being someone who still thinks in old money, as Mum used to say—I always think of temperature in Celsius. It’s another number that I can’t connect with lived experience but, again, I’m reassured. The plane disappears beneath the clouds and where it goes next, and what happens to all those people and their microwaved meals is a matter of probability rather than hard fact. Diane Keaton is 77 and still lights up the screen, even in bad movies, and—though I can’t begin to understand why I’m here, licking frozen coffee at thirty-five thousand feet—I find this profoundly reassuring.

Bio: Oz Hardwick