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
Duel in the African sun
Somewhere in Mozambique – With consummate poise, I execute a series of big cape passes, the odd natural or two thrown in for good measure. After five minutes of this, I am quite prepared to retire behind the makeshift bullring for a quiet bottle of lunch.
But the crowd will give me no respite. Five veronicas, the classic pass of the big cape, bring them to their feet. A languid relobera, a sweet chiqueline, and I begin to feel that I will never again be able to find peace of mind in the mundane world of journalism.
Then they let in the bull.
Being at all times honest to a fault, I will be the first to concede that the animal which comes pounding into the arena is not a fighting bull in the true sense.
Possibly, it is slightly smaller than the fighting variety. And, well, possibly a bit younger.
I am also willing to admit that its horns are not of a size one normally associates with fighting bulls. But further than that I am not prepared to budge. (My colleagues, with their usual cynicism, will claim this description perfectly fits a calf. But if there is any such talk, I shall sue.)
At one stage during my training, I had considered taking the first charge on my knees, as I had once seen the great Antonio Ordonez do in Seville. Now, however, I reject that plan as frivolous and exhibitionist.
My substitute ploy, though less spectacular, is far more effective. I merely turn sideways to the line of the bull’s attack and disappear.
For ordinary mortals, the trick would be impossible. But for a man of my lateral proportions (I would make the young Sinatra look like an overstuffed gourmet) it is easy.
Bewildered, the bull blunders on.
Twenty metres away, an aged toureiro is reclining against the bamboo stockade, chatting to a friend in the stand. The bull takes him unawares, horns ripping through his trousers, raising a bruise on his thigh.
Hopping about indelicately on one leg, the man lets fly two flurries in Portuguese which I interpret loosely as “Please, you must be more considerate” and “Why do you not use the cape?”
Back in the middle of the sandpit, I feel it is time to establish supremacy. Shoulders erect, I leap nimbly into the air and yell “Toiro!”
It is a terrible mistake. Hardly have I landed when the bull is upon me.
Round and round the ring we race. After five laps I am ahead. On the seventh, I almost lap my snorting adversary, but manage to check my pace.
By the ninth circuit, we are both dead beat. We face each other through the settling dust. The bull stands there, chest heaving and mouth agape. I stand there, chest heaving and mouth agape. It must be a horrible sight.
After a statutory two-minute pause, we are at it again.
The bull comes on. Hopefully, I extend my cape. It is a reflex action, like the threshing of a drowning man. Amazingly, it works. The bull tears at the red square, misses comprehensively, and ploughs a neat furrow in the dirt with its nose.
When it charges again, I have summoned up enough energy for a lame veronica, while shuffling off in the direction of where, in cricketing terms, square leg would be.
Now the bull, with evil aforethought, decides on a change of tactics. From a distance of two metres, it suddenly takes off. I choose the same instant to get my front foot trapped in the folds of the cape, and fall.
Fortunately, the bull has badly over-judged its leap. By the time it is able to turn, skidding like a puppy on a polished floor, I am thirty metres away and still moving.
The chase begins afresh. Midway through the eight round, it is obvious which way the result will go. The bull begins to move in for the kill.
What happens next is not in the script. At the height of its final lunge, the bull seems to lose co-ordination and crashes down in a superb belly-flop. From this position, legs splayed, it eyes me like a beached porpoise.
Now the aficionados are around me, slapping my back and mumbling praises. Someone thrusts a bandarillio, the long coloured dart, into my hand. It is the old toureiro, his thigh bound with an incredibly dirty handkerchief.
“Come, amigo,” he says softly. “Now you must place the dart in the toiro’s neck to signify the kill.”
But something in the man’s tone makes me decline. I have never been able to stand the sight of blood.
Particularly my own.
From One Man’s Africa.
A wing and a prayer
LUANDA – Perhaps because of their maritime background, the Portuguese display a healthy cynicism about airlines and flying.
Many still maintain the acronym of their national carrier, TAP, stands for Take Another Plane.
And in the old Lourenco Marques, Mozambique, expatriates from the mainland used to say the name of the internal service, DETA, was equally cautionary. It warned travellers: Don’t Expect To Arrive.
What slogan, one wonders, would they apply to the present-day TAAG (Transportes Aereos de Angola) line in this other independent province?
Terror And Anguish Guaranteed? Transports Arabs And Goats? Either would be apt.
Travelling TAAG is like being on a mid-quality indigenous bus in almost any part of the continent, with the essential difference that the trauma is all taking place at 30 000 feet.
The impression that this may not be your ordinary everyday shuttle begins with a small maul at Luanda Airport at six in the morning – a crush of humanity, of people violently intent on being somewhere else.
To say the aircraft eventually becomes packed would be a laughable understatement. Every seat is taken, three-quarters of them twice over. The additional numbers consist of children, lap-held. Some are sucklings, noisily having breakfast. Most of the rest could qualify as the oldest babies in the world.
Such congestion makes it difficult to slap at the mosquitoes and flies that screen anxious first-timers from the demonstration of how they would be expected to conduct themselves should the aircraft end up in the drink.
A subjective appraisal of conditions suggests that prospect may not be too far distant.
Outside on the apron, a hefty queue of passengers snakes its way to another TAAG 737. Following it is a tractor and trailer bearing that flight’s luggage.
A man in overalls is riding shotgun on the trailer. It hits a rut in the tarmac and several suitcases and parcels fall off. This amuses the trailer attendant to the extent that he tosses a few more over the tailgate for good measure. He continues to chortle as he arrives and helps load the hold.
After the plane to Malanje takes off, five cases and two parcels remain scattered on the apron.
While the cabin doors of our aircraft are about to close, two white men clamour up the stairs. “We’re with the commander,” they say. Immediately, two seats are cleared in the front row and the congestion ebbs back to compensate.
Coffee, tea or milk? A ridiculous prospect on Flight 016. Although there are five hostesses aboard, adding madly to the overload, no trolley would be able to negotiate the aisle.
TAAG captains seem to have a width of discretion on public safety. The man who flies us to Lubango takes the direct route, right over the war zone. And he does not bother with the tight-circle descent, the internationally accepted way of keeping missiles out of posteriors.
We eventually return to Luanda by a deviation further out to sea, taking in distant aspects of Benguela and Lobito. That pilot should go far; the other, the further the better.
Lubango airport is like a scene from MASH, abuzz with helicopters, hospital planes and MIG-21s and 23s. The MIGs are enthralling with their low sweeps and parachute-assisted landings. We have a fair opportunity to appreciate them. The plane from Luanda is an hour late.
But its lateness is less surprising to the government officials who have delivered us to the airport than the fact that it has arrived at all. Apparently every day at Lubango airport contains an element of lottery.
Just ahead in the queue is our commander himself. At the foot of the stairway he is stopped by a private in the Fapla army, who says he may not proceed until the aircraft is searched.
“But I’m the captain!” says the captain.
“Maybe you’re the captain in the air,’ says the soldier, ‘but I’m the captain on the ground.”
TAAG advertises 15 regular flights out of Luanda. Insofar as it is within my power to decide, the airline will be at least one passenger short on every such occasion.
From “One Man’s Africa”
John Ryan 