Aeroflot Flight SU0242. March 29th2011.London – Moscow

Jaffa Cake: A round soft sponge type thing topped with orange coloured jelly and covered in a thin layer of chocolate. How was anyone supposed to know a Jaffa is an orange when it doesn’t say so on the box? It said ‘Jaffa Cakes’, meaning that Jaffa was either the name of the company or it was an actual fruit in its own right, like a kiwi or a banana. Or it could have even been a totally made-up name like rock cakes, which to my knowledge contain no rocks at all. How was I supposed to know that Jaffa wasn’t a country, or a person? Where I grew up there was a local man called Jaffa; and although I suspected it wasn’t his real name it was the only name anyone knew him by; and besides, people had all sorts of weird names, especially in the food world, like Captain Birdseye and Mr Kipling. It was a basic logical deduction that led me to believe that, much in the same way Mr Kipling had invented a type of cake, Jaffa Cakes were invented by someone named Jaffa.

I was in my late twenties when I discovered that this wasn’t true, that Jaffa was, in fact, a type of orange from a place named Jaffa. I listened to my friends talking about some poor bugger who had admitted that he didn’t know what a Jaffa was. And to my newly acquired middle class, it was something they could laugh heartily about. They couldn’t imagine living in a world where people had no experience of Jaffa oranges being anything other than a slice of gooey jelly placed on top of a cake that came in packs of twelve and was nice enough, and affordable enough, that your mother bought a pack every Friday when she did the shopping.

Why is a Jaffa Cake a Jaffa Cake and not an orange cake anyway? An apple pie is just an apple pie. It’s not as if a pie baked with Cox’s apples is called a Cox Pie, or a Golden Delicious Pie or Pink Lady Pie. Why not orange cake? Because Jaffa sounds posher, I guessed. Though the only Jaffa I ever knew was the fella who apparently, back in 1985, could get you cheap tracksuits that ‘fell off the back of a lorry’. Took me a while to figure out what that one meant too. For many years I wondered why they didn’t just make lorries with better locks or load them with less stuff before they travelled.

This was, of course, a distraction. It was all I could think of to keep myself from going crazy. As I took the last of the Jaffa Cakes from the box in my rucksack and stuffed it into my mouth, my mind slid slowly back into panic. There was one question and one question only, rolling around my brain like a ball in a pinball machine, causing me to shudder every time it hit the forefront of my mind. Although it was madness – real madness – I couldn’t help but wonder: ‘Was she going to eat me?’

Point of No Return

When the doors to the plane were closed and we were taxiing for runway, butterflies began to have twins in my stomach. Or perhaps it was more of a panic attack. It was my first flight alone. I couldn’t hear anyone speak English and all the other people on the plane looked decidedly Russian. Dark thoughts began to enter my mind, pooling like drops of water from a leaky tap. Before I left Wales a helpful friend of mine had shown me an article where a Siberian woman roasted her husband on a barbeque and gobbled him up. There were plenty of other horror stories online about British men deceived by Russian honeytraps, left penniless and passport-less after being beaten and robbed. In these stories vulnerable men were usually lured over by hot women who secretly worked for organised gangs or Russian mafia.

Being of moderate intelligence I wasn’t altogether convinced I would be eaten by Siberian cannibals, but still, I was afraid. It was completely irrational and a bit cowardly, but while I had nobody to talk to and knowing there would be few people who could understand me once we reached our des