People have done it to me and it grates. So, ever so considerate of the feelings of my fellow humans, I waited until after dinner before trying to stretch out and get my Australian-sized bum comfortable in a seat which had been designed to accommodate a more streamlined model.

Whack! I felt it through the rear of my seat. Apparently the person behind me was engaged in the same sitting process and had inadvertently kicked me.

Whack! Whoever it was must have been finding it extraordinarily difficult to achieve a degree of comfort as they had kicked me again.

Whack! Strike three required, by my rules, a response. So I turned to see a dark-skinned, silver-haired, bird-like woman in a sari glaring at me malevolently. I smiled, provoking her into lashing out with her foot and delivering another kick to my seat.

She looked like someone's saintly grandmother. She could have passed for Mother Teresa, if you can imagine Mother Teresa sinking the slipper into the back of someone's seat, her upper lip curled in a snarl to reveal a charming set of darkly stained teeth.

"Dear God," I thought, "why me?" There must have been 300 people on the aircraft and only one crazed, sari-wearing granny with an apparent hatred of unwieldy Australians, and I was seated in front of her.

If she had been a bloke, we could have had an argument, threatened to disembowel each other with our plastic dinner knives and, having indulged in the required degree of macho huffing and posturing, resumed our seats and gone to sleep. There's not much, however, you can do with a silver-haired woman whose black eyes are ablaze with incandescent loathing. And I hadn't even tilted the seat all the way back.

I wanted to go to sleep. I couldn't do this sitting up and there were six hours remaining in the flight. I tried sweet reason, got up and said with what I hoped was an endearing smile: "I'm going to sleep," laying my head on my joined hands in the international symbol of sleepy-byes.

Rather than placate her, this seemed to irritate her even more. There was obviously a language barrier here, but surely the woman could see reason. Nice man from Australia wants to go sleep-bye - and everyone in the world knew the sleepy-byes sign.

"I'm going to sleep," I repeated loudly, going through the sleepy-byes pantomime again and heading off to the toilet to complete my in-flight napping preparations. When I returned, my seat was fully upright. While I had been gone, she'd tilted my seat forward. So I sat down, buckled up and tipped it back again. Whack! Another kick. With a boot like that, she could have got a run with the Brisbane Lions.

The person in front of me had their seat back. Almost everyone in the cabin had their seats back and were sleeping. The crew had turned down the lights - it was beddy-bye time and I was being kicked every 10 minutes by the grandmother from hell.

As appeasement had proved spectacularly unsuccessful, I decided to escalate the conflict and pressing the tilt button, I pushed the seat all the way back. I'd take her legs off at the knees if that was the way she wanted to play it.

The seat flipped all the way back, a tactic which must have taken her by surprise for there was no immediate reaction. Perhaps she had been bending down when the seat came back and was now trapped with her head jammed between her legs. One could only hope. Six hours bent double might modify some of her more anti-social tendencies.

It was a forlorn hope as she recovered quickly and landed two more swift kicks. I got a blanket and pulled it up over my head and tried to block out the world. Every 10 minutes she'd give me another belt with her boot and continued like this until we were preparing to land.

It was the longest flight in my life. It happened about 6 months ago and I was reminded of it when reading the results of a survey of 1000 air travellers who listed the reclining of the seat by the person in front for the entire journey as their number one hate.

Crying children also were listed. I sympathised as there is apparently a notation against my name in every airline reservation system in the world which reads: "Loves children, especially babies with the ability to scream for extended periods. Seat all crying children within two rows of him."

Body odour was another. In the US, airline staff can and will refuse to allow passengers who are, to use that delightful colloquialism, "on the nose", to board aircraft. Not so in this country as I discovered when exposed to the armpit odour of a hairy, singlet-clad ape during another recent flight. It was so powerful it should have set off the security checkpoint's metal detector.