Displaced in Mullingar: Air travel is no longer the preserve of the rich elite, but it is still a dream for the world's have-nots, finds Michael Harding

Recently I met a man from Africa who said that when he went on an aircraft for the first time he pretended to be rich. Affectation was the name of the game, he said.

He was flown away from a corrugated slum just outside Lagos, in a Jumbo 747, with dinner in the sky and free drinks. He had three brandies.

The lovely hostesses went click-ity clack along the aisle with napkins and coffee, wearing exotic perfume and fixing cushions and getting extra blankets for elderly passengers, as they flew away from Murtala Mohammed International Airport, and out over the deserts of North Africa in the middle of the night.

Being poor, he belonged to a class of people who weren't really entitled to be on aircraft. Like opera houses, fancy restaurants and jacuzzis, the 747 flight to Paris was a domain of shiny polished aristocrats in flowing robes, who know the invisible ropes on which hang the power of the world. But with a few other friends in loose-fitting suits he kept his mouth shut and enjoyed the view.

On that first occasion he got dizzy from the brandy and tried to chat up a female immigration officer at Charles de Gaulle. He crept around the airport, wary of young soldier boys, in dark blue uniforms, with pistols and machine guns, and floppy berets; white boys staring at him as if he was a loose baboon.

I told him that my first plane journey was to New York. On the way home, I stretched myself over four seats and slept like a baby, because in those days there were plenty of half-empty planes flying back across the Atlantic.

"But Ryanair changed all that," I explained. "No empty planes anymore!"

"Not at all true," he declared. "It was not Ryanair! The truth is that Africans got televisions, and now nobody wants to spend their life in a slum, or a refugee camp, for 50 years, in the back end of nowhere. The entire world is looking for wonky passports, plane tickets, and an address in Europe."

There are some men born great, and some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon them. So if Michael O'Leary wants to invite me to dinner, I'm sure he will find me eventually, in the telephone directory, pick up the phone, and thrust himself upon me.

He will invite, and I will accept, and there we will be, the two of us, somewhere in the lush suburbs of Westmeath, drinking goblets of wine, and sharing humorous anecdotes about how we both got to where we are today.

I'm not a flamboyant person. I'm not the kind of person who would flaunt a relationship with Michael O'Leary, if I had one; and I don't. But if I did, I wouldn't be bragging about it.

Nor would I dare insult him by whinging about the garish colours of his aircraft interiors, which remind me of the inside of a creche.

There's no point in blaming Michael. He's only responding to the population explosion, and the desire of most people to better themselves.

By the time I first stepped into an aircraft I knew I was not born to greatness. And now, after many years of endless failures, I realise I have not achieved greatness. But I still sense that greatness can be thrust upon a person for no reason at all; Destiny makes odd choices.

That's why some black people get through the barrier around Europe, and others get hurled back to where they came from, or get thrown out of the boat, to die in the sea along the coast of Tenerife. It's also why many poor people do the Lotto; they simply hope that Destiny will change her mind.

I never do the Lotto. But I endure the winter in Mullingar with quiet expectation that some day I will be plucked from the street, and raised into a world where private jets and helicopters transport god-like creatures above the clouds.

And like all the other little people, I enjoy the consolation of shopping. I buy shoes from China, in a store called Texas, and shirts in Dunnes Stores for €3.

Me and the black man look out the window of a coffee bar called Chocolate Brown. A leaflet at our feet offers cheap flights to the Riviera.

"Maybe you will win the Lotto," I say to the black man.

"Oh yeah," he laughs. "And maybe boss man will invite you to dinner."