Peter Rhodes on cheap flights, welfare theft and a dodgy tummy at 30,000 feet

We have friends who love the atmosphere of the Cheltenham Gold Cup. However, this month they'll be watching it not at Cheltenham but on a big screen with better food, cheaper booze and excellent company. They'll be flying out and enjoying Gold Cup 2025 in Benidorm. And, they assure me, saving money in the process.

Mind you, while flying can be ludicrously cheap, it can also create some hideous moments. Like the four-hour nightmare recently endured by one passenger, flying from Australia to Qatar, when a fellow passenger collapsed and died. The cabin staff wrapped the corpse in blankets and put it on the seat next to him. You don't get that with a bus pass.

I have never flown next to a cadaver but once, on a flight from Toronto, I found an aisle seat with enough room for my badly bruised leg (snowmobile accident; I never talk about it) when an agitated couple appeared. The husband pleaded: “Can my wife sit next to you? She has terrible diarrhoea.” This seemed an excellent reason for her to sit somewhere else but they were distraught and what can one do?

It struck me at the time that “terrible” was a wasted adjective. In a steel tube six miles high, the only sort of diarrhoea is the terrible sort.

Donald Trump claims that millions of welfare cheques go to bogus claimants shown on the records as being more than 150 years old. I bet this, like so much Trumpery, is one per cent truth and 99 per cent baloney and may make us smile. But whatever the true figures in America, here in the UK “fraud and error” costs the Exchequer almost £10 billion a year. Still smiling?