Are you a ‘recliner’ or a ‘refrainer’? Do you ease your seat back on an aeroplane as soon as you can, or remain bolt upright and swallow your fury as the headrest in front is lowered a few inches from your nose? Or are you to be found in the slender oval on the Venn diagram; the waiting room between recliner and refrainer, hanging on until the food service has finished before caressing the recline button? Whose armrest is it? Nobody cares anymore. All anyone wants to know is will the person in front of them recline their seat? 

Cambridge is coming out very badly from the Jason Arday affair

What students still get wrong about the Final Solution

Britain has made its mind up about Nigel Farage

According to a survey published this year by travel website The Vacationer, more than 77 per cent of respondents think it rude to recline your seat fully, thereby transforming a seemingly innocuous act into one charged with social tension. Sprinkle in a heady dose of ‘airport disorientation’, and all bets are off. Steve Taylor, Psychology Lecturer at Leeds Beckett University, highlights the liminality of airports, calling them ‘zones of absence’. In other words: on an aeroplane, anything goes. What might cause you to blush on terra firma is barely an afterthought in the sky. There’s a reason they have a club........

© The Spectator