Happy with bad airports and ugly fruits
I was on the London underground yesterday going from Green Park to Finchley Road and reading a newspaper when suddenly an elderly lady sitting next to me tapped me on the shoulder and asked whether she could have a look at it as well.
“There is an article there about Heathrow,” she said while literally pulling the paper out of my hands. “I was there yesterday,”” she continued opening it on the right page. “I have to read it. It was a nightmare.” Another lady on the other side of the carriage looked at me in amusement and then we both looked back at the lady gulping the article down.
“I was there too,” I said. “But it wasn’t a nightmare only yesterday. It is a nightmare all the time I am afraid.”
“I was there too,” joined in the other lady. “Flying has become such a hassle nowadays. You need two or three hours just to get onto the plane. I think I am going to start using trains.”
I bent over the article and read that Heathrow had to cope with 68 million passengers last year, is congested, overcrowded and seriously understaffed. The author however didn’t stop there. He also described his recent trip to Tokyo. “The travelators all worked,” he marvelled about Narita. “The escalators have been adapted to take luggage trolleys, and there were no queues anywhere – just a line-up of attendants bowing visitors in the direction of the vacant booths at passport control or towards the luggage carousels in case non-Japanese could not work out the signs.”
“Yes, I remember,” I thought nostalgically. “Cleanliness, efficiency, space. An absolute beauty of display. No wonder that ten years ago I had such a lot of fun flying around the world. It was because my residential airport was Narita.”
“But then Larnaca is not that bad either,” my thoughts continued. “It is small and it has never taken me more than twenty minutes between the landing and getting into a taxi to Nicosia. Gosh, I think I am actually blessed.”
I got interrupted again by the lady who was reading my newspaper. She just started another article – this time about whales and Japan gaining control over the International Whaling Commission. “Oh, oh oh,” she said. “What a disgrace. They will kill all these cuties.”
We all bent over the story again. There were actually five of us by then. In the piece, Joji Morishita, the Japanese whaling official, was arguing that whale watching and whale hunting go together very well.
“It is exactly the same as going on a farming tour, seeing sheep and cattle and eating a barbecue after that,” he said and added that actually Japanese whalers cared about the animals’ welfare and humanly tried to cut down the time to death.
“Yeah, of course, they are good at this,” commented a big guy on my right. “What about the way they serve dancing shrimps on the rice. The poor things are still alive in your mouth. Does it mean they suffer less because they live longer? And baby eels? They boil them alive.”
The paper also quoted from the last year’s interview with Japan’s ambassador to Australia who had said that Japanese people didn’t eat whales any more. They ate beef from Australia instead and actually were very shocked to learn that barbaric Australians ate kangaroo and ostrich.
“Rubbish, rubbish,” continued the guy on my right, obviously an expert on Japanese food. “They eat Kobe beef from their own cows in Kobe that they feed with beer. And they make whale burgers in Hokkaido and Kyushu, and serve them to kids at school.”
My newspaper lady turned another page and now we were staring at an article about “ugly fruits” being sold at Waitrose. Red apples and pears with pear-shaped bums no more, it said, no more perfection on the British supermarket shelves.
“Yuck,” said the woman who was just about to switch from planes to trains. “Does it mean that Waitrose will now be like Heathrow? Total chaos and smelly?”
“No,” the expert on the Japanese food answered. “It’s like Charlotte Church admitting that she is plump and feels sexy because of it. They are trying to tell us that ugly and fat can be beautiful. That’s all.”
I got off the train at my stop – with my precious newspaper, went home and, as a normal maniacally self-obsessed journalist, went to my favourite newspaper on line – the Sunday Mail – to check what was happening on our beloved island. I read an article entitled Soul Meets Soul about a psychotherapist who last weekend held a workshop in Tochni teaching Greek and Turkish Cypriots how to meet each other heart to heart.
“Welcome back to the Cyprus problem,” my head said and I started wondering whether I would rather be a WAG (Wife or Girlfriend of a British footballer) in Baden-Baden spending thousands of pounds in its fashion boutiques or one of the BBC celebrity stars secretly earning a million a year and having lots of fun.
And you know what? No, actually I don’t think so, thank you very much, I am quite happy and sure I prefer my own chaotic and imperfect ‘bad airports ugly fruits’ crazy little life. The only question is what to do with the whales.
