Winter of a pukka sahib’s discontent
DAYS, I’ve noticed before, seldom bode well when one begins them by missing a plane.
Missing, in this instance, should not imply the physical departure of aforesaid aircraft for it is there, large as life on Chennai airport’s apron, pilot most likely still gulping down his motion-sick pills. But the assistant airline manager remains adamant. Check-in time is two hours before, not dam’ twenty minutes.
We tell him: Blame the dam’ New Delhi fog. It got us here late, if eight-thirty in the morning may ever be so construed. Why, anyway, does Indian Airways insist on flying out of New Delhi at sparrow? Certainly not to escape the fog, we say. Why doesn’t it fly the night before?
Loud altercation. Then, from our side, attempts at craven pleading. If we miss this connection, we point out, we’ll be stuck in Colombo for a week. Only one weekly flight to Johannesburg from there. Second prize, two weeks in Colombo. So forth.
We adjourn to a private office, for the deputy airline manager to hear our case. He listens, eyes hooded like a judge, then announces that the argument is academic. The Chennai-Colombo flight has left, winging southwards even as we speak.
Huge anger, only some of it theatrical. But it succeeds in invoking the Airline Manager himself. He arrives, kicking rumps in his wake, bearing profuse apologies and offers for us to stay overnight at company expense. Also propaganda about Chennai being the real jewel in India’s crown. Forget the Taj Mahal, the Pink City: Inspect our modern slums, view our waterworks.
The man is well-meaning but his presentation falls apart after we mention the problems with the Colombo link. When we suggest the airline’s obligation in the matter should extend to a swift charter flight, the manager disappears. Not to be encountered again.
Back to town and the tour operators. There is a slim chance of seats on the Air India flight to Harare, thence Johannesburg, though flights are wait-listed. My own situation is less severe since I intended to be in London anyway in three days. At minimal extra cost, approximating one leg, I can fly there from Mumbai, via Kuwait, tomorrow.
Night in Mumbai, mooching around the terminal. All the decent hotels are full, suggesting a convention of snake charmers, up-market beggars.
Mumbai airport seethes with low-flying aircraft, lower-flying luggage. See London and die, see Mumbai and duck. Killing time, dodging suitcases tossed hand to hand among sundry labourers, I remember one of my own.
It is in a locker at Johannesburg airport, lodged there on my way to India a week ago. The plan was that I should return to Johannesburg on the Saturday (tomorrow), meet up with my wife and accompany her to London the next day, swopping suitcases in transit. To wit, one with all manner of winter woollies – in the airport locker – for one now in hand, containing pukka sahib cotton goods and soiled underwear.
This original arrangement was rooted less in logistics that economics. First light, I broach the Mumbai airport kiosks. A Kashmir sweater would be ideal. One size smaller and it could double as a present for my wife. Not a Kashmir sweater in the place, nor sweater or jacket of any kind. Eventually, I am forced to settle for a Mumbai T-shirt with graphic views of the harbour.
The plane for London in late. Not surprisingly, for it has come from Auckland and Sydney. It is also dry. The dam’ Aussies have drunk all the beer. And no prospect of replenishing at Kuwait; you can lose a hand for tippling in that place.
Twelve hours of agony. And the movie is last week’s, Johannesburg-Colombo. More shock-horror. The skipper announces that it’s snowing in London.
Thank goodness for British reserve. Anyone wearing shirt-sleeves over a Mumbai T-shirt in brass-monkey weather at Kennedy or La Guardia would be a public spectacle, laughed to scorn. I pass through Heathrow, Customs and all, without one comment, although I read a few thoughts. They say: Man’s been at the duty-free liquor, out of his skull, probably lost his overcoat down the loo.
Even the skinheads and soccer thugs on the Underground display only mild, but happily mute, astonishment. At Russell Square, my stop, the shops are long closed. I make my hotel a sprint ahead of terminal exposure and withdraw to room service and the television.
Next morning, Sunday, I review the situation. A search through my luggage produces a pocket mackintosh I forgot I had packed against the Indian monsoons that never eventuated. Anything better than nothing. And maybe something will be open in Leicester Square or Piccadilly.
Then suddenly the awful prospect dawns of being apprehended around Soho in a plastic raincoat, Sunday morning or not. (“But, officer, I was only looking for something to warm me up!” “I’m sure you were, sir, kindly step this way.”)
Downstairs, the bellhop informs me he knows of a clothing place that will be open at Notting Hill Gate. Much safer. Dash there, find it and – for 20 pounds – a foam topcoat that immediately transforms me into the Michelin Man.
Halfway back to Russell Square, I remember I have left the plastic raincoat on the Notting Hill Gate shop counter. Oh, well. I trust it will go to some deserving voyeur.
Speaking at this moment in time . . .
Travelling steerage on an Airbus some days ago, I was puzzled to encounter an object with a label proclaiming it to be a “motionary discomfort receptacle”.
Puzzled I was, for a while, because the thing looked just like an airsick bag and unquestionably would have been able to serve the same purpose.
It was even in the pocket behind the seat where one expects to find airsick bags, along with the last encumbent’s toffee wrappers and the airline literature, always so graphically illustrated, that shows passengers where to store their dentures before the moment of impact and how to conduct themselves in a lifebelt once the aircraft is to the bottom of the Indian Ocean.
What has happened, of course, is that obfuscation simply has taken to the air. And, indeed, why not? What better place for jet-age jargon than in a jetliner?
Not that obfuscation is a modern phenomenon. Far from it. But it certainly has never had so many apostles.
Obfuscation, as if you didn’t know, is the art – or science, since it generally seems to be employed in scientific directions – of saying what you have to say at as great a length as possible, using the most obscure terms available. (To obfuscate means to darken the mind.)
Obfuscationists come in many categories of competence. Down around the lowest rung is the person who talks about “parameters” and refers to “this moment in time”, when he means “now”. But then, as you might imagine, it’s an exacting science or art, since a person’s natural inclination is to be as direct as possible in thought and speech.
Who is to say how much midnight oil is burnt along the corridors of science, commerce and industry as departmental scribes strive to bring the highest degree of obscurity to their memoranda and reports? Or how many person-hours went into that single instruction that came with your new lawnmower telling you how to “reverse the transit screw adjuster bolt at the rear of the baseplate co-ordinating catch before depressing the upper support stay”?
As if to confirm my belief that obfuscation has gone into the air travel business, a Government notice landed on my desk yesterday about “conditions relating to the disposal or use of aviation fuel”.
In it the author outlines various regulations that apply to “power-driven, heavier than air machines deriving their lift in flight, chiefly from aerodynamic reactions on surfaces which remain fixed under given conditions of flight”.
He means aeroplanes.
These regulations, it seems, are different from others that have to do with “heavier-than-air machines supported in flight by the reactions of the air on one or more power-driven rotors on substantially vertical axles”.
He means helicopters.
The author almost lost me with one reference to “an air transport service in connection with which flights are undertaken with such a degree of frequency that they cannot reasonable be regarded as merely casual or isolated but are undertaken between points which do not vary . . .”
Of course, he’s talking about regular flights. But how clever to put it that way?
Obfuscationists get around. There is at least one in our company, witness a memo that reached me recently about a sister newspaper with “approximately four per cent more manpower than was estimated as being adequate”.
This state of affairs, the memo concluded, was “mainly due to the under-utilisation of the Leave provision”. Or, to put it another way, because some people weren’t taking their holidays.
Another example of obfuscation at its best comes from a brochure seeking applicants for the Boston Consulting Group, wherever that might be. It says: “Financial compensation for successful performance . . . is certainly likely to be sufficient to remove it as a constraint upon any reasonable standard of living.”
Which means the pay’s okay if you’re good enough
Or how about this, from a house magazine, advertising an in-company health scheme? The ad says, “The only applicants likely to be refused entry are those with multiple pre-existing medical episodes.“
Or people who get ill a lot.
Curiously, one of the great crusaders against obfuscation is the Old Thunderer, The Times of London. The newspaper frequently runs angry letters in its readers’ columns about obfuscation – like one this month from a professor at Queen’s College, Oxford.
“Sir,” it read, “would someone please inform our politicians and political writers that ‘parameter’ does not mean ‘rule’ or ‘convention’ or ‘limit’?
“Yesterday, parameters were being observed. No doubt we shall soon be having them loosened up, thinned out and boiled down.”
Excellent advice, I’m sure, if you happen to have any dealings with parameters. Personally, I wouldn’t presume to touch them with a barge-pole.
If, that is, they are capable of not being touched with a barge-pole.
John Ryan’s Time Wounds All Heals column
If you can’t stand the heat
It was in my early years of bachelorhood that I discovered a feeling for the culinary arts.
Some men resist kitchens as they might the main computer room at Cape Kennedy, but I have never been one of those. My attitude to that traditional female preserve is: If you can’t beat them, scramble them.
In this mood last weekend, my family in town at a matinee, I decided to whip up a Quiche Lorraine for us for supper. Now a Quiche Lorraine, as any gourmet cook knows, is a tricky little dish in that one has to achieve just the right blend of bacon, cheese and seasoning, being in the process extremely canny with the salt. A pinch too much will spoil everything.
I had just finished this delicate preparation, had just popped the flan into a preheated oven, when the doorbell rang.
It was a young man from a commune down the road, though I hardly recognised him at first behind a flour-mask that extended from chin to eye-level. He seemed equally taken aback to find me in my ruffled apron but recovered to ask if I could let him have a bouquet garni, mispronouncing a name I could see was as foreign to him as colloquial Kurdish. He also asked if I knew anything about pastry-making.
Is the Pope a Catholic, I said to myself, but aloud I told him, “I think you’d better take me to your recipe.” We picked up the bouquet garni on the way out.
The kitchen in the commune was enviably large but in a state of devastation. Unwashed utensils lay about as though distributed by a hurricane.
At the centre of things was a pastry board containing a very solid lump of dough and surrounded by ingredients that indicated a production line for a steak and tomato pie. The recipe was there to prove it, though half hidden under a jumble of plates and pans.
It seemed my new friend George (for the sake of anonymity) had drawn the short straw in the cook-of-the-day stakes. His commune mates were all down at the beach.
Thus far, George had followed the recipe in good faith, taking care to prepare everything before the actual baking process. But the tomato looked as if it had been garrotted, the onion chopped by the simply process of throwing it under a bus. The garlic had been butchered skin and all.
I set all this aside, suggesting it might be saved for some future soup, and called for a new lot. I began by showing George how to skin tomatoes by immersing them in boiling water, then in cold.
Next I demonstrated the best method of slicing onions, halving them first to stop them rolling around. Then I tapped the garlic to loosen the skin.
“Now the way to crush a clove of garlic,” I told George, “is to place it in salt. After that, it comes apart at the point of a knife. Like so.“
Having adjusted the oven, I trimmed and floured the meat and placed it all in a pie dish with salt, pepper and the bouquet garni. I rolled the dough to the thickness of a five-rand piece, set it with a hole at centre, decorated the top with pastry leaves and brushed on the beaten egg. I considered breaking the egg with one hand, as I am able to do, but rejected the idea as possibly too ostentatious. Then I put the pie in the fridge for ten minutes to relax.
“That’s a good tip to remember,” I said to George. “A lot of cook books don’t tell you to do that.”
While waiting for the pie to settle, I put on the kettle with George’s permission and made us some tea, pouring the tea into the milk to scald it. Somehow tea never tastes the same the other way about.
George had seemed most impressed at all these goings-on and said as much. “Look,” I told him, “cooking’s just a matter of knowing a few basics, then being able to read the recipe.
“Women deliberately load the whole thing with mystique. It’s a defence mechanism. They’re afraid we’ll think less of them. If too many men came to realise how easy it was to cook, the stature of the woman slaving over the hot stove just wouldn’t be the same.”
George said he saw.
After ten minutes, I took the pie from the fridge, baked it for 30 minutes at 220C until the pastry was well risen and golden brown, then lowered the heat and left the rest to George. I told him the meat should be done in about two hours and suggested one or two accompaniments. Perhaps just cauliflower and peas, if George could manage those.
George could hardly thank me enough and rushed out ahead of me to buy the frozen vegetables.
Outside, a light rain was falling but the world seemed an exceptionally good place. I got to thinking how right that axiom is, about it being better to give than to receive.
In these spirits did I whistle my way home, back through the front door and up the stairs. Back to the acrid and highly distinctive smell of burning Quiche Lorraine that emanated from the kitchen.
Still, the tinned spaghetti we eventually had for supper was opened to a nicety.
John Ryan 