The minuscule plane that looked like something from the set of a Biggles movie landed, perfectly safely it must be said, in the Isle of Man. It takes most passengers, even those not riddled with nerves, a few minutes to get over the unexpected pleasure of being on Earth again, and the conversation has a slightly hysterical tinge as you wait for the bags to come round on the carousel.
"Never really knew raw fear before," said a man inhaling a cigar down to his toes.
"Safer than the big ones if you ask me," said an ashen-looking man who was too weak to grab his own bag as it sailed past him three times.
In a few hours England would be playing Colombia in the World Cup so, partly to be pleasant and partly to reassure myself that I still had the power of speech, I said to these people who to me were very obviously English: "I hope you'll do well tonight in the match." They looked at me in amazement.
"What exactly do you mean?" asked the man whose case had been dragged from the conveyor belt by a child, but he himself still hadn't the strength to lift it.
"What precisely are you saying?" asked the man surrounded in a cloud of cigar smoke.
For more than five decades I have been asking myself why do I not let anything go?
Why couldn't I stand there like everyone else, glassy-eyed at the shock that this thing had landed on a runway and that the future lay ahead. In the interest of keeping some kind of global conversation going everywhere I had to mention the match.
"Well," I said, "you know". They didn't know.
As far as they were concerned the purveyors of "Marching Powder" should win.
These men I was talking to were not English, they said with lowered brows. They were Manxies.
I beamed at the Manxies with approval, nodding like a fool determined not to say anything else at all that would be misunderstood.
I was dying to ask them about the cats. Manx cats with no tails. But it didn't seem the time.
There was a very small lift in the hotel, two people entering it would be best advised to know each other quite well because by the time it had gone up several stories an intimacy of sorts would have been achieved.
An American man of about 40 and myself approached it at the same time.
He was slightly ahead of me, but he jumped back as if he had been electrocuted: "I think you should take the elevator alone, Mam, unaccompanied to your floor."
He spoke gravely as if this was something that could cause an international incident.
I demurred a bit, he was there first after all, the thing took all day and all night. "Maybe we could risk it together," I said, "I mean it's not as if we have any heavy luggage."
This phrase seemed to make him more anxious than ever.
"No, Mam, it is true we do not carry much baggage, nevertheless it would perhaps be more politic if we rode in different elevators."
I seemed to be sending out such wrong signals all day that I was afraid to speak further. Politic? I just stood and looked at him anguished.
"Possibly, Mam, you come from a simple island people with none of our bitter experience in the United States of litigation."
Well, of course, I do come from a simple island people, who seem to be becoming increasingly used to the bitter experience of litigation, but he probably thought I was a Manxie anyway and "don't explain, don't explain".
"Do you mean you and I might end up suing the elevator company?" I said. I had just got off a plane that had landed in the face of what to my mind seemed insuperable difficulties, maybe it would be tempting fate to get into a dodgy lift.
"No, Mam, I was referring to the possibility of us suing each other over an accusation of sexual harassment in a confined space," he said.
I looked at him thoughtfully and took the lift up on my own without further discussion.
And then things calmed down and it was a wonderful weekend . . . All food and drink, chat and laughing really, as it happened, and not much sightseeing and culture.
But then weekends anywhere can work out like that and when you come back nobody really wants to hear the history of a place you have visited for just under 48 hours - that's what I told myself. Firmly.
There was a great long esplanade in Douglas which everyone said was terrific for walks, but somehow we never got to doing them.
There were fish restaurants, Tex Mex lunch places, cream teas, aborted journeys to places on the other side of the island, halted because things were racing each other along the roads.
We all paused to write a postcard to a friend in Dublin who had just had a hip replacement, because some of us knew how great it is to get postcards under such circumstances.
Anyway, my cousin Dan Binchy noticed that the symbol for the Isle of Man is this sort of three legged thing and he wrote to our newly hipped friend that people on this particular island liked hips so much they had three of them.
Then we met Dan and Joy's son who is a lawyer and he had a T-shirt saying: "Why are lawyers replacing laboratory rats?"
It was a mystery until we all read the small print. The answer was that there are more of them, lab assistants don't get attached to them and in the end there are some things lab rats won't actually do.
It was time to come home.