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Oliver Cross: Delay reactions
My recent Turkish holiday was rather marred by a 24 hour flight delay, which meant that just when I should have been inhaling the warm breezes of the Aegean sea, I was stuck in a hotel in Holbeck, Leeds, and very much aware of the difference.
But I'm not complaining. The whole episode was as educational as minor disasters often are and taught me at least two things about the British Character, firstly that ordinary British characters are sensible, practical and patient and secondly that official British characters are prone to hysteria and are not to be trusted in a crisis.
Nerves at the halfway stage of the saga were frayed by about 12 hours of waiting and the very dispiriting experience of being loaded, at least 200 of us, into a plane and having the plane taxi towards the runway then, without any clear explanation, taxi back again, as if the pilot had suddenly developed a fear of flying or had forgotten what he was supposed to do next ("I think it's to do with the wing fins", I wanted to shout helpfully).
Naturally, this affected the smokers more than the rest of us because smokers taking short-haul flights embark with a vision, that if the carousel's kind to them and if passport control isn't having a strop, it will only be a few short hours before they can step on foreign soil and inhale their biggest, most satisfying drag of the year.
So there was a sort of polite, non-violent, British protest when two vanloads of police were sent to quell the passenger riot which they were apparently told had broken out.
From my observation, there was one young man who may have been a little disorderly, although not much more than you might expect of any sentient person locked for hours in a very dull airport with only an over-priced bar for entertainment.
Most of the rioting passengers were just asking whether anybody might have any reliable information about what was happening, please, which nobody did, or were asking politely if there was anywhere they might smoke, which brought out the police's Tiananmen Square tendencies.
"Smoking is against the law," barked one, as if the passengers were such hopeless degenerates that they might not know that.
"Yes, but..."
"If you break the law you will be arrested."
"Yes, but..."
"Smoking is against the law."
And round and round until the exhausted passengers (average age around 50, typical employment retired florist) gave up attempting to find out whether the airport had any sort of emergency provision for smokers or, which was everybody's most pressing concern, whether someone would be kind enough to tell us what was going on. No they wouldn't.
Incidentally, all this wouldn't have been such a problem in Turkey, where all public buildings are plastered with shiny new 'No smoking' signs, possibly in preparation for joining the European Union, and nobody pays any attention to them at all.
It's not as funny as it used to be up north
I've just found out that Leeds Metropolitan University has organised a series of interesting Wednesday afternoon talks by the Institute of Northern Studies, and I'm wondering why I find the concept of northern studies faintly amusing.
I suppose it's because I'm thinking of the Monty Python sketch where some well-fed Yorkshire businessmen have a boasting contest about their deprived northern upbringings – "You slept in a box? We didn't even have a box, we slept in a paper bag," or something like that, me being one of the only people of my generation who cannot repeat Monty Python sketches by heart, which just shows how clever the mostly southern-based, Oxbridge snobs who wrote the sketches were.
Anyway, and putting northern stereotypes aside, not that anybody round here ever does, I do think that the real distinction is not between north and south but between the south east of England and the rest of Britain.
There is a good argument in economic-geography terms for concluding that the South East is really another country. For example, you might have thought that the recent financial collapse would affect the South East, where bankers live, more than the rest of the country, but in fact the worst-hit recession area turns out to be the north of England, which is an indication of who's in charge and is likely to make northerners even more gloomy and paranoid than they usually are.
The Institute of Northern Studies' open-to-all talks (tel 0113 812 3980 for details) include Victorian Leeds's greatest newspaper (not, disappointingly, the YEP); air pollution in industrial Lancashire and Yorkshire; the northern novel and decolonization (eh?, as we say up north) and a history of northern comedy.
I fear that this last talk may start strongly and then rather fade out because things have changed since nearly all comedians, apart from unfunny ones and Max Miller, came from the north – George Formby, Morecambe and Wise, Al Read, Ken Dodd and Hylda Baker for example. Now, after you've started your 'great contemporary northern comics' list and written down Peter Kay and Victoria Wood, it takes hardly any time at all to get down to Cannon and Ball.
The problem has to do with the decline of traditional industry and the growth of higher education and performance studies. The only way to reverse things would be to send would-be comics to do their character-building apprenticeships somewhere (China? Uzbekistan?) where there are still appalling levels of air pollution and working mills and mines with very poor safely records.
And while we're on the north-south divide, can I make an appeal on behalf of the anti-cliche league that nobody ever again says "Those southerners, they think" (doing a ludicrous northern accent) "that it's all cloth caps and whippets ooop ere."
No southerner, I'm sure has, ever thought that. It's a puffed-up northern invention based on a self-dramatising notion of victimhood and it's very, very tedious.
Do you WC?
Turkey has very interesting signs to differentiate male and female toilets (OK, it also has natural wonders and ancient treasures, but you can't expect me to cover everything). The male sign shows a rather creepy-looking man holding a huge, and possibly symbolic cigar, and the female sign shows a stern woman with a hat and some sort of sash, like a militant suffragette or the Brown Owl of your nightmares.
I did try to get this explained but the Turks, although very friendly and helpful, couldn't seem to understand my interest and generally ended up by saying things like "second door on the left."
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Saturday 26 May 2012
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