Memo to the nation’s religious leaders. When delivering a sermon, here’s an idea: try to make it relevant or interesting in some way.

I bring this up because last week on Radio 2’s Pause for Thought a Buddhist was trying to tell us to think of others and not just ourselves.

Now there are many examples he could have used here. There’s the parable of the good Samaritan, which has worked well for thousands of years. Or there’s the parable of the John Prescott, an inarticulate fat man who was steered though life by his pant compass and his class hatred and ended up lost in a tabloid world of hate and “Two Shags” ridicule.

But no. The story we got was about a “wicked man” whose only good deed on earth was not treading on a spider. So when he died, the spider lowered a sliver of thread into hell so he could climb out.

With me so far? Unfortunately, lots of people also used the thread to get out and it snapped and they were all killed.

So what’s the good Buddhist trying to say here? That if you let others share your good fortune, everyone will die? That the wicked man wasn’t wicked after all? Or that he’d written the sermon after sniffing several pints of glue?

Whatever, the story was rubbish, so this morning I’m going to see if I can do better with my own sermon on selfishness. It’s called the parable of the British Airways Flight to Barbados.

There was a wicked man who had agreed to go on a golfing holiday with his boss. Plainly this had not gone down well with his wife, who had demanded that she come too, and their children, one of whom was a baby.

Now British Airways does not allow you to smoke while on board, or carry knitting needles or have sexual intercourse with other passengers.

You are also not allowed to board if you have shoes with explosive soles or if you’ve had one too many tinctures in the departure lounge. And if you make any sort of joke, about anything at all, in earshot of the stewardesses, you will be tied to your seat as though it was 1420, and you were in the stocks.

But you are allowed, welcomed even, into the club class section of the plane even if you are accompanied by what is essentially a huge lung covered only in a light veneer of skin.

I want to make it absolutely plain at this point that I never took any of my children on a long-haul flight until they were old enough to grasp the concept of reason. It is simply not fair to impose your screaming child on other people, people who have paid thousands of pounds for a flat bed and therefore the promise of some sleep.

There’s talk at the moment of introducing planes with standing room for economy class passengers. Imagine the sort of seat you get in a bus shelter and you’ll grasp the idea. Fine. So why not soundproofed overhead lockers into which babies can be placed? Or how about flights where under-twos are banned? I’m digressing. The family at the centre of this morning’s parable were seated in club class, between me and another columnist on The Sunday Times, Christa D’ Souza. I said I wanted to write about them. Christa said she wanted to kill them.

The crying began before the Triple Seven was airborne, and built to a climax as we reached the cruise. And this was the longest climax in the history of sound. It went on, at Krakatoan volume, without hesitation, until we began the descent eight hours later. At which point, thanks to a change in pressure on the lung’s tiny earholes, the noise reached new and terrifying heights. I honestly thought the plane’s windows might break.

And what do you suppose the mother did to calm her infant? Feed it some warm milk? Read it a nice soothing story? Nope. She turned her seat into a bed, puffed up her pillow, and pretended to go to sleep.

I know full well she wasn’t actually asleep for three reasons. First, it would have been impossible. Second, no mother can sleep through the cries of her own child, and third, every time I went to see Christa I made a point of trailing a rolled up newspaper over the silly woman’s head.

So why was she pretending? Aha. That’s easy. I know exactly what she said to her husband as they left home that morning. “If you’re going to play golf while we’re on holiday, you can be child minder on the plane. I spend all day with those bloody kids. I’m doing nothing.”

This is almost certainly why the lung was so agitated. Because the person it knows and loves was apparently dead, while it was being jiggled around by a strange man it had never seen before. Because he leaves for work at six in the morning, doesn’t get back till 10 and is away all weekend playing golf.

And that’s why he was put in charge of the children, and that’s why the flight was ruined for several hundred people. Who then had to spend a fortnight in the Caribbean, terrified that the lung would be on their night flight back to Britain.

It wasn’t. And this is the point of my sermon. I do not know what happened to it. But if there really is a God, I like to think it was eaten by a shark.

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