Between 1963 and 1970, I kept a daily diary with about 1 A4 page of mainly boring, repetitive
information per day. The purpose of this page is to illustrate things I refer to
elsewhere.
This particular entry is interesting because it's the oldest description of jet lag that I
know–and it happened to me. The first mention in the Oxford
English Dictionary is:
1969 “A. Cade” Turn up Stone i. 23 The long journey, jet-lag and the heat had
given him a headache.
It also gives some idea of jet travel in the mid-1960s. Nowadays there are non-stop
flights from London to Kuala Lumpur. Interestingly, the total time hasn't changed much.
This was the last day of the summer term at school
(King's College, Taunton). I spent many
holidays at Netherton House in Combeinteignhead, and on this occasion I went there first to
spend the night before heading home to Malaysia for the holidays.
Finally took off [from London] and found ourselves bound for Istanbul, which was
rather contrary to my expectations, and arrived there at 1610 hrs [UTC] (local time
1910).
I didn't note when we left London, but the flight from London to Istanbul must have
taken about 3 hours, so we would have left round 1300 UTC.
Had lunch at about 3.15 pm,
I'm not sure what time zone this was. According to notes in the diary, I used GMT (UTC)
until I reached Kuala Lumpur, but I'm sure we arrived in the daytime, and 3.15 pm UTC
corresponds to 2045 West Malaysian Time
and I left most of it, not feeling particularly hungry nor well, and after that, and went to
have a freshen up before landing at K.K. [K.L. Time from here on].
Finally we got there, and Endah was escorted out, but we had to wait for health things to
go thorough. As seems usual when I land at K.L. airport, it was pouring with rain, and we
were escorted down in the shade of a pyong each.
Based on my recollection and the text above, I'd guess we arrived in KL about 1630.
That's 0900 UTC, or a flight time of 20 hours. That's rather more than I recall (I thought
about 17 hours), but still not that much more than the 13 odd hours it takes today flying
non-stop. Most of the time was taken up by takeoffs and landings, of course; the planes
have not got faster in the intervening time.
For some odd reason, I woke up at 4.00 and could not get back to sleep again. About ½ hour
later, I got up, dressed and downstairs to the spare bedroom, where Else's pups were and
spent some time reading the education file, which contained quite a few interesting letters
concerning me.
At 0530, felt dead beat again, and went back to bed. ...
