The Club World section of a British Airways 747 looks a little bit like a corporate cubicle outlay – gut-high partitions separate alternating bow-and-stern facing seat arrangements in a sort of transverse Air Force kind of way – pilot never notices navigator, and so on – dividers ensure you don’t have to see your one-hundred and eighty degree neighbor if you don’t want to.

I am amazed at the brilliance of the design of the cabin – the seats themselves contain a startling variety of things-that-hinge-out-from-inside-other-things, and lit panel arrangements yield to curious fingers to discover the entire seat arrangement is on electronically-actuated motors that flatten, raise, or otherwise contort the seat in ways that can really only be described by eigenvectors, perhaps more easily visualized as your grandpa’s recliner on Superbowl Sunday.

Footrests and snap-out remote controls for the television screen – on-demand video systems showing the latest movies and absolutely nothing starring Ben Stiller. Power plugs and a miniature travel kit with revitalizing eye cream (I have no idea where or when to apply revitalizing eye cream).

Even the overhead compartments mesmerize in some geometric way that fixes my attention until I can figure it out: the oval forms of the storage spaces are rotated, they lie horizontally amidships, flat in the vertical direction unlike the tall, big-brother storage spaces of the short-hop aircraft; it evokes in me the zero-angle zaftig-visions of 50’s UFOs, when things were curvy without apology.

I think my grade-school teachers would call this flat-across arrangement “the hamburger way”: orthogonal to the “hot dog” way, you see, where the long axis is up and down. I’ve been trying for years to explain this concept and it’s clearly still not working. That’s public education for you.

The silverware is weighty, though the lack of serrated edges on the knives reveals a flaw in the so-far sparkling stone; it is the reality of a recently-conflicted world. Another conflict to resolve is my own issue with airline gourmet; they serve antipasto for starters, and halfway through my consuming something beyond my food pay grade – a mushroom pate, I‘m assuming – my palate screams back to my more Virginia-agrarian roots, and I sink my teeth into a warm dinner roll. Ah, there we go.

My purposely-dulled knife is unable to score the skin of the tomato I’m served, and I’m left with a smashed seedy pool on my plate that looks, if you arrange the artichokes the right way, vaguely like the remains of a car crash. Screw you, 9/11.

Finally, the main course is out, and again, nods are made to air security. The steak – or more appropriately, short rib – is sirloin-ish, easy to cut. Sort of meatloafy. You get the idea. The gravy, however, forgives all transgressions, and the whole of the thing is sensible while somewhat sensuous. How did they do that?

All this, note, while we passengers retain only the vaguest of senses around being transported somewhere else, somewhere that’s expensive enough to justify eye cream and miniature glasses of Chardonnay (serial-numbered to avoid theft). In this reality, with a service crew and little to no word from the flight deck, the mechanics of the journey are the afterthought, not the primary. The service crew is careful to shut any open windows to maintain a running illusion that we’re actually in someone’s house and they – with apologies – simply have the vacuum cleaner running.

I mention this not to emphasize or elevate my own station, but to indicate that there remains something worthwhile about air travel. I have previously pointed to my love of airplanes and the travel culture surrounding them, and maintained, in the midst of the screaming babies and foil-wrapped meals in coach that there was something still redeeming about civilian consumer flight. Dignity aloft.