The Bug continues its series of extracts from travel editor Don Gordon-Brown's latest award-winning book, due out soon.

A wee bit frightened by jet travel?

Toilet occupied!
Is there any sign on an international jet flight likely to cause more widespread panic and fear than those two little illuminated words?
What's that? The flight crew running at full pelt down to the back of the cabin, sobbing uncontrollably as they rush by fumbling with parachute harnesses wouldn't be a very good sign either.
All four engines falling off in flames? Not a good sign, granted.
But you're missing the point here. I'm talking "sign" signs.
On those flights where the Good Lord above has already decided that 200 tonnes of aluminum siding, countless megalitres of Avgas and 300 easily-bruised homo sapiens can defy logic and gravity to hurtle through the abyss for 15 hours straight and land on foreign soil without major mishap.
Except, as stated above, for that "Toilet Occupied" sign.
Notice, if you're a seasoned international jetsetter like your humble travel writer, how it's never lit up when you're only half thinking of going.
But you don't because it'd be too much trouble waking the two sumo wrestlers blocking your way to the aisle.
Or if you're on the Methodist program like me - and there's no stronger drug - you stay put otherwise other passengers guess what you're going up there for.
Or you'd really like to go but you're afraid that half way down the aisle, some little silver-haired old lady on a souped-up silver walking frame and a very visible colostomy bag is going to rocket out of nowhere and take the piss out of you.
That's when, caught like a shag on a rock, you pretend that all you really wanted to do was stretch your legs. Hoping from leg to leg is just your way of doing it, okay! And because everyone's looking, you lean over a few sleeping bodies and peer out the window, a pretty stupid cover really seeing it's the middle of the night and all the shades are down.
So to avoid all this potential embarrassment, you stay in your seat and hold it in. I'll go tonight when everyone's asleep. I'll wait till after supper. If I sit really still at this odd angle, with my head tilted just that much, and then crane my neck ever so gently like so, it won't stop me thinking about going to the toilet but at least I might just make out a picture on my high-tech in-seat video screen.
I'll hold on for as long as it takes, literally. London can't be that much further, surely. And it's been almost five hours since we left Brisbane on our very first Cathy Pacific's all-expenses-paid-by-us flight to Europe.
And then the beer and the boredom and the bladder finally win out, and you've simply got to go.
You stand up and the sign that has been unlit for the last four hours while you were making up up your mind over a few beers is now ablaze: "Toilet Occupied!"
It's decision time. And, yep, you end up doing what you'd tried to avoid for hours; waiting in line in the aisle, just behind the silver-haired old lady who shoots out of nowhere and heads you off at the piss.
So you both wait. And wait.
Now, if it's true that a watched kettle never boils, it's equally true that a watched airline lavatory door never opens. Well, almost never.
And even when it does, it's also a well-proven axiom of modern jet travel that I've just made up which goes thus: the person who lumbers out of the cubicle is always a red-faced man of approximately 23 stone in a Hawaiian motif shirt, sweat pouring profusely off his forehead and who clearly loves nothing better than hoeing into a very hot vindaloo curry every evening meal and then some. The little old lady is a seasoned traveller; she shakes her head, wobbles back to her seat and passes out.
In a split second, you've got to make up your mind whether to go in that cubicle or your tracksuit.
You mind races and you've got to ask yourself a simple question, punk: what was he doing in there?
Maybe he was only joining the mile high club, solo division. You could handle that. Just.
Number ones? Or was it something far more sinister? What did he have for dinner the night before the flight? What were those stains all over his dark blue hibiscus shirt? If I go in there, will I survive? If I go out here, will I be arrested?
It's a recurring dilemma which can really get your nose out of joint in more ways than one.
Besides, why are there so few toilets on such large aircraft, especially when they put on the free piss for hours on end?
Like a lot of life's quandaries, the solution is simple.
If Ms Pacific - one day I hope to be on first-name terms - has the technology to put individual video screens on the back of each seat, why can't they install those pull-down urinal/toilet bowls, just like they have in those first-class sleeping cabinettes on the Sunlander and modern, luxury trains.
I'm sure most reasonable fellow passengers would not mind at all if you drained the python discreetly in your seat, rather than having to get them to stand up twice - on you wee way and on your way back.
"Ahhh, that's better." Flick. Flick. "Is your final destination London too, miss, or are you going further afield?"
Then, after a few hours chatting and you are the stage when you're quite comfortable with your fellow travellers: "Boy, that fish and salad we had for supper is really starting to talk to me! I just gotta take a dump."