Rod Liddle, associate editor of The Spectator, has died aged 66. This is one of the first columns he wrote for the magazine on March 9, 2002.

It’s always a life-affirming moment – for me, at least. The aeroplane has groaned and wheezed its way up, up, above the city and – improbably, to my mind – established a sort of equilibrium with the ethereal new world around it. The engines begin to sound more at ease. Perhaps I won’t die this time, after all.

And then, the seatbelt signs flick off, and from somewhere far down the aisle, towards first class, there comes the chinkety-chink-chink of the trolley. So, I am not going to die – and, better still, I’m going to be given a nice drink.

This rather lovely sequence of events occurred, in exactly the same way as they usually do, on a recent flight from Kampala to Heathrow. My companion on the trip was the editor of this publication who, during take-off, as I sweated with terror, slouched in his seat, oblivious to notions of mortality, reading a book about how the British Empire was unreservedly terrific.

Eventually, the trolley reached us. We were given a pleasantly chilled Pouilly Fume and – here’s where the sense of euphoria and wellbeing dissolved in a microsecond – a “snack.”

Let me tell you about this despicable confection. Its basic ingredient was a reconstituted, premasticated cereal that had been sprayed with, or immersed in, the following: disodium guanylate, tocopherol, sorbital, glucona-delta-lactonc, monosodium glutamate, sucrose esters of fatty acids, hydrogenated goatshit. Sure, I made up the last one, and perhaps it is hypocritical of........

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