Trolley Dollies

Travel on a low-cost carried like EasyJet in the UK and you'll find when you get on board the stewardesses are orange-faced, slightly plump, Liverpudlian or Essex girls with cheeky grins and sharp tongues. Fresh-faced from their Travel and Tourism NVQ, energetic, smiley, these are party-girls out to have a good time. They're feux holiday reps with the same brisk organisational style.

On British Airways, you generally get something more refined, more experienced, more stockings, less tights. These are James-Bond-style brunettes, infinitely sexy, early-thirties, calm under pressure, probably horse-ride at weekends and likely hold a man's attention in every continent.

Go on any Asian carrier - Thai International is a good example - and the stewardesses look like they've stepped off the catwalk, stunning, wearing elegant sarongs, smiling million-dollar smiles. Courteous and subserviant. Service is effortless. They bow when you board and disembark.

Now you get on any US airline - American, Continental, SouthWest (are my sampling points) - and you'll see US stewardesses are almost to a woman aged, over-50, haggard-looking, with scraped-back fake-blonde hair, wearing ill-fitting, plain pinnafores and lower than knee-length skirts. I'm not criticising invidividuals here, I'm sure they're all lovely women looking after their families in Minnesota or Kansas, but I'm fascinated by the contrasting stereotypes. They seem to have been selected especially to bulge in places their uniforms have least been designed to do so. They're austere as they pass out the $5 beers and throw packets of those "salted snacks" which double-up for peanuts in these allergy-afraid days. Why are attractive American girls not in the airline game?

I have no idea why there is such a clear distinction between each nation's stereotypical stewardess. I'm not sure it's even worthy of comment but strangely, it disappoints me every time I fly to the US. How silly.

UPDATE: Just to pursue this pointless and sexist line of enquiry still further than it ought to be pursued... I determined by observation that the American stewardesses in First Class are significantly more attractive than those in coach (as defined above). Which makes me question who is the person and what is the process by which stewardesses get assigned their classes and, since it is so obviously selecting on "attractiveness" how is this possible in today's supposedly equal-rights society? I picture the selection process as similar to the picking of the football team at junior school - where the worst players get left until last and picked over by the captains for their every flaw. The bulging stewardesses left to waddle and squeeze down the aisles in coach while the slender ones wander between the gloriously-spaced first-class swivel beds.

PS I wasn't upgraded, I just peered into the wonderful comforts of first class from economy.