I’d like to thank my Mam, my Dad, Baby Jesus, Josh and Eric Cantona

Finally, the recognition I feel I deserve. I’ve won the prestigious and glittering ‘Post of the Week’, from the lovely folks at, erm, postoftheweek.com.

“Terrance’s adept story-telling,” they reckon, misspelling my name, “made me laugh out loud – long, and hard – and so for that he gets the prize.”

Which is great news for me. It means I’m batting three for three in writing based competitions – the other two being Channel 4’s Young Journalist of the Year and the Virgin Atlantic flight VS026 to Orlando in-flight Poetry Competition.

Fame and infamy is just around the corner people. And here’s a Virgin Atlantic based archive piece to celebrate the achievement. I’m far too important to come up with decent original material now.

“On Jan. 19, Virgin Atlantic Flight 27 was en route to Florida when a threat was found scrawled on a bathroom mirror. The message, “American must die,” was written in soap, officials said.”

So begins the report on the CBS News website, detailing the story surrounding the trial and conviction of the member of flight crew who left the message.

This story is fairly important to me as I was on Flight 27 to Orlando. We were a good five hours in to the flight when we had to turn back to Iceland. I was half way through whichever God awful inflight movie Virgin had decided to thrust upon us as we wobbled our way down the emergency vehicle lined runway at Keflavik Airport. It was, I seem to remember, a scene reminiscent of the closing ten minutes of Die Hard 2. But with less Bruce Willis.

In moments of aeroplane based emergency, I tend to look to my father (a frequent flyer through business) for reassurance. Usually he sits in a state of zen like calm, a default position for my Dad. But as we came in to land in Iceland, he was pale and visibly stirred (not shaken, my Dad is far to cool to ever get shaken). This made me feel very bad indeed.

At this point we didn’t know fully what had happened. We had only been told that a message had been found on board, and that in the current political climate these things had to be taken seriously. And so despite being almost over land in North America, and despite us all wearing our Florida Holiday clothes, we turned back to Iceland where we would eventually spend 24 hours being interrogated by the FBI.

When we landed we were told to collect our belongings and were herded off the plane, by US Military personnel, and in to buses. From the runway we were driven to massive hangers, where we had our hand luggage tagged, taken away from us, searched, and given back to us. From there were we put back on the bus and we waited. For hours.

I don’t know how long we were on that bus for, it seemed to last for fucking days. People were cracking jokes, trying to make light of the situation, but all I could think was “I’m supposed to be in Disney World”. I didn’t see the fun in sitting on a runway in a desolate part of Iceland being interrogated by the military and the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

My Dad could see the worry and discontent on my face and he did something I will never forget. He managed to smuggle his mobile phone on to his person and called home to my Grandma and find out the football scored. “Manchester United beat Blackburn 2-1.” He told me. “Van Nistelrooy scored a penalty meaning he’s set a new Premiership record for scoring in consecutive games.”

From then my mood lightened. Ruud and my Dad had combined to make this brief sojourn to Iceland acceptable. Not even the food we were provided with – mushroom soup followed by fish – could dampen my mood. As we were driven to the hotel we were to stay in, we saw the Northern Lights. People gasped and gawped and looked in awe. It was one of those magical moments you never forget. But I knew it wasn’t the Northern Lights. I realised straight away what it was. It was the Sun shining out of Ruud’s arse, lighting up the way home just for me.