Concorde? It was OK

By Adrian Chiles BBC Two's Working Lunch programme

There is only one sure way to impress your friends and infuriate your enemies: tell them you've flown on Concorde.

This has been the case for a long time but it's even more true this week as the great machine flies for the last time.

I've been on it. I've done it.

It was, well, OK.

Don't get me wrong, I'll forever be grateful for the opportunity to have flown it, but like many of life's great moments looking forward to it and looking back on it are more fun than the moment itself.

The problem is schadenfreude or, more accurately, the lack of it.

Let's face it, the whole point about executive travel is the feeling of well-being that flows from the knowledge that you're travelling in comfort while your co-passengers are suffering elsewhere in the train or on the plane.

Cattle class 747s

The trouble with Concorde is that it is all one class. Everyone's in the same boat, albeit an ultra high-speed vessel very high-up.

The nearest you can get to poking your head through the curtain from club class to cattle class is to look out the window and try to spot 747s lumbering along 20,000 feet down.

Even at the terminal building at JFK in New York you're largely robbed of the satisfaction of parading your privilege in front of other travellers - the Concorde check-in is entirely separate from hoi polloi.

For many years Concorde's regular fliers have been paying for just that: no dross

I'm sorry but that's just bad planning.

Did British Airways never realise that half the pleasure would be queuing up at Concorde check-in feeling the hatred and envy of the cattle class passengers boring into the back of your head?

The other issue is space: you pay for a first-class rail or plane ticket on the unspoken understanding that, such is the exorbitant expense of the thing, most of the seats won't be taken.

This is as true of a Virgin train to Birmingham as it is of a flight to New York. And for many years Concorde's regular fliers have been paying for just that: no dross. No people like me.

Party atmosphere

But in these dying days of Concorde that's all changed: every seat has been full.

Such has been the demand that if they'd wanted to they could have charged the same money for tickets sitting on people's laps, and no-one would have minded.

For the party atmosphere this has been wonderful. For the regular Concorde travellers it has been sheer misery.

He registered his frequent-flyer status by eating nothing but an apple

The bloke sat next to me was a tall American dressed like a minor British royal: brown cords, yellow v-necked pullover.

Not many people scowl when they're travelling at twice the speed of sound. He did. Mourning, the whole way, for the beautiful half-empty machine he used to know and love.

He registered his frequent-flyer-therefore-I-am-above-you status by eating nothing but an apple he'd brought aboard himself.

He was easy to pick out: we once-in-a-lifetimers were so full of beef, Montrachet and the finest stilton that it was starting to ooze out of our ears.

As for the flight, this is all you need to know: the take-off's fantastic, really fast; cruising, you're so high up you can see the curvature of the earth below you and the darkness of space above you.

And apart from that, with limited legroom, it's like any other short-haul flight except the food and wine's immeasurably better and more plentiful.

Voice cracking

Lest you think me unnecessarily cynical I should say that I was moved.

Moved by the First Officer, his voice cracking, telling us this was his last flight and his job would never be the same again; moved too by the woman who told us she and her husband had been saving up for this trip for their wedding anniversary but could only afford one ticket so she'd come alone.

And the woman who as a brilliant young mathematician had worked on the design of the wings in the 1950s but had never flown it before.

She shed a tear for the thousands of other - as she put it - "little people", who'd made a contribution but had never flown it.

It's amazing how too much red wine makes you immune to bathos.

Still, I'll miss it.

West Londoners are a cynical hard-faced bunch.

What else could stop us in our tracks day after day, year after year, as it came in to land.