There once was a woman who died of jet lag. Her name was Sarah Krasnoff and in 1971, after finding herself caught up in a bitter custody dispute, she learned that international air travellers were exempt from custody laws. So she and her teenage grandson spent the rest of that summer on a series of 160 trans-Atlantic flights. They were delayed in fluorescent-lit lounges, turned their watches back and forth, chose between chicken or beef and reportedly watched 22 movies an average of seven times each. The jig was up when Krasnoff collapsed and died of massive heart failure.
This week, arriving back in the U.K. after a two-week stint home in Canada, I found myself thinking of Krasnoff. I got off the plane dazed and disoriented. I dropped off my suitcase and charged out into bustling central London to buy supplies for a party I had planned that evening. After two and a half hours, my yield amounted to some cheese and a case of dry vermouth I mistook for wine. Jumping out of the taxi, I handed the cabby a £50 bill and told him to keep the change.
"But miss," the driver called back, "it was only seven quid." That evening I dressed for the party - stockings backwards, shoes on the wrong feet, more liner on my lips than lashes. My boyfriend put on his new playlist and I poured myself a glass of vermouth. A song I liked came on.
"PIL?" I said.
He shook his head. "MIA."
The next one was even more familiar. "Wait," I said. "Just give me a minute. Is it ... Mitsou?"
He looked at me like I was nuts. "Dude," he said, "it's Madonna." It seems that I'd left my brain four time zones back. I imagined it bobbing in the frigid swells, somewhere between Goose Bay and Reykjavik. Physically, my trip was over, but the journey into holiday jet lag had just begun. It's a territory I know far too well.
And it's a state that is unlikely to be improved by the deal inked last week by Canada and the EU to relax restrictions on international air travel. The pact is meant to ease security regulations, increase airline personnel and generally up the amount of air travel between Canada and our trans-Atlantic neighbours. As someone who has made the trek from Toronto to London nearly a dozen times in the past year, I welcome anything that will reduce the amount of my life spent eating chicken fingers at the Beaches Boardwalk Café in Toronto's Terminal 3.
But what I really need - and what all chronic trans-oceanic travellers long for - is a cure for jet lag. I've tried melatonin and Dramamine, solar lamps and brisk walks in the fresh air. None of them work.
The inconvenience of several hours' travel is negligible compared to the strange netherworld of jet lag that follows. Like New Year's Day, when the entire city seems grey with a collective hangover, so Christmas is the time of year when the jet-lagged rise, like zombies from the grave. We walk among you, blending in where we can. Look closely and you can see us: We are the ones fumbling blearily with gift wrap or humming the wrong words to Good King Wenceslas into our eggnog as everyone else makes small talk.
Jet lag, it has been noted by the essayist Pico Iyer, is the perfect metaphor for modern migration. The fuzziness that follows a long flight brings with it the illusion that we have conquered space and time by being neither here nor there but somewhere in between. And yet, as Iyer points out, jet lag is anything but a metaphor. "It is painfully real, as real as the words that are coming out slurred or as that piece of paper on which we have methodically added two plus two and come up with three. We have been placed at a tilt, and the person who emerges from us is someone suffering from something much deeper than the high-frequency hearing loss or the superdry sinuses that come from flying 500 miles an hour above the weather in a pressurized cabin."
Most dangerously, at Christmastime, there is a good chance that person will be expected to carve a turkey.
As more and more of us hop on planes and cross time zones in the effort to join friends and family for Christmas, we will find ourselves in that strange limbo - neither home nor away but lagging somewhere in the middle.
Be kind to your jet-lagged relatives this Christmas. Drip brandy into their coffee and don't object when they fall asleep at dinner.
Assure them that, with one notable exception, jet lag is not a fatal condition.
As for the jet-lagged minority, if we don't seem ourselves, that's because we aren't.
This is the dirty trick of modern travel: It takes the "there" out of being there.
Like everything else about Christmas, it's exhausting.