Coming Home to Story

Ha! I knew you wouldn’t be able to resist.

I was passing through Bristol airport again this week; how I love that place (see blog Don’t Get Me Started, 4 April 2012). This time the Jobsworths stopped me carrying 100ml of fresh air on to the aeroplane. Our exchange went something like this:

“You can’t take that on board. We’ll have to confiscate it.”

“It” was a half-empty 200ml glass medicine bottle containing rather less than 100ml of Honey and Lemon Throat Balm. “Why not?” I asked. “It’s medicine. I’m a performer and I need it for my throat.”

“I can see what it is,” replied Junior Jobsworth. “Do you have a prescription for it?”

“It doesn’t come on prescription. You buy it over the counter.”

“No prescription, no medicine.”

“But it’s less than 100ml. And it’s in a polythene bag of the correct dimensions. I measured it. Am I not allowed 100ml of bottled and bagged fluid?”

“It’s not the fluid that’s the problem. It’s the bottle. It’s a 200ml bottle.”

“Yes, I know. That’s why I made a point of having it less than half full.”

“You can’t take it on the plane.”

“This is ludicrous. What difference can it possibly make if it’s in a 100ml or a 200ml bottle. The difference is approximately 100ml of air. I would like to speak with your supervisor please.”

Actually, I didn’t use those precise words. What I said was: “This is f***ing ridiculous. Give me the bottle and I’ll drink the medicine right now.”

At this, Junior Jobsworth, still clutching my bottle of medicine, marched off to consult Senior Jobsworth. I saw them conferring earnestly for a minute or two before Senior Jobsworth came over to me, bottle in hand: “You can’t take this on board. It’s 200ml.”

“No,” I said. “As you can see, it’s less than half full. It’s not even 100ml. If you really won’t let me take it on board then let me drink the medicine now.”

“You can go back outside the security area and drink it.”

“What! What conceivable difference does it make where I drink it?”

“That’s the rule.”

“Then the rule is ridiculous.”

He walked off with my bottle of medicine which I presume found its way into a waste bin. “Imbecile,” I muttered sotto voce, with just enough self-control not to get arrested for breach of the peace. I picked up my laptop, repacked my bag, put my belt back on, and made my way grumpily towards the departure lounge.

What is it about the word “Security” that engenders such rigidity and lack of discretion? Somebody please tell me how either employing morons who cannot think for themselves or (equally bad) employing intelligent people who are obliged to act like morons, makes any of us one jot safer. The Jobsworths were not impolite (though, admittedly, I was). They were merely stolidly intransigent and lacking in any sense of complicity with me in the face of arbitrary regulation.

I didn’t want them to break the rules. I didn’t even mind very much about the loss of my half bottle of throat balm. I would have been happy if they had just said something human, something  like: “Yes, I know it’s ridiculous but we don’t have any discretion at all. Sorry about that.” I don’t think that’s too much to ask.

Here’s how it’s done: later the same day, at Schiphol Railway Station I went to buy a train ticket and asked if I could have the advertised senior’s discount. The Dutch woman behind the counter smiled and shrugged. “Sure,” she said. “The discount is only 50 cents though. It’s so small it’s crazy but what can we do?” I smiled back at her, enlivened by our brief contact and delighted with the – albeit miniscule – saving I had just made.

There are good airports elsewhere in the world, even some great airports. Munich, for example is a veritable cathedral of understated, friendly, efficient service. But UK airports seem determined to inflict all manner of pettifogging restrictions on travelers whilst trying to fleece them at every opportunity: an almost unique combination of institutional stupidity and corporate greed.

Thus, at Bristol Airport (which my partner continues to insist is convenient whilst I maintain it is merely close to home) once through Security, there is only one way to the departure lounge: running the gauntlet of the obscenely consumerist Duty Free Zone where one is urged to purchase large quantities of what appear to me to be dangerous flammable liquids in the guise of perfumes and spirits which, ironically, one is quite free to take on board the aeroplane of one’s choice.

“I wonder what would have happened,” I thought, fighting off the semi-hypnotic urge to shovel assorted travel goods into a basket, “If the Jobsworths had paid for pints of beer in a pub and had been given half pints in pint-sized glasses. Would they have accepted the argument that it’s the size of the container that counts? I don’t think so.”

Later this week, I’m off to Shropshire to spend a few days fishing with my older brother Pete. We used to fish together as boys – those times are amongst the very best of my childhood memories. He has lived in Canada for the past 45 years and comes back to England for a few weeks each summer to enjoy the kind of fishing he has missed ever since he emigrated.  We’ll use float rods with light tackle to catch roach, chub, bream and – best of all – carp.

I’m looking forward to it. Well, I think I’m looking forward to it. Mostly I’m looking backward to what happened at the end of our first day’s fishing last year:

“One more cast,” I said. “I want you to see me catch a fish.”

“OK mate. Take your time,” said Pete, standing behind me on the jetty.

He lit a Benson and Hedges as I flipped the line out and waited for the float to settle. After a couple of minutes a fish began to nibble the bait and the float trembled and bobbed. Then came the bite. The float slid away under the water. I lifted the rod and struck. I felt the tug of the fish as it pulled against the line. It wasn’t a big fish – about an 8 ounce carp – and I reeled it in easily. As it came to the bank, I slipped the landing net underneath and lifted it clear of the water.

Pete came forward and peered into the net. “Not bad little brother,” he said as I took the hook out of the fish’s mouth and released it back into the water. “Not bad for a youngster.” Then he pointed beyond my rod tip; “Your float has come off.”

I followed his gaze and sure enough there was my float, no longer attached to my line, floating freely in the water. “Damn. That’s a good float. It cost me £2.99. I’ve been catching fish on that all day. The clip must have come undone.” It was only a couple of feet beyond my rod tip. I stood up and leaned forward as far as I dared, to hook it with the rod tip and bring it back to the bank. It was just too far for me to reach. I flicked out some line to lasso the thing instead but it didn’t want to be caught.

Pete soon tired of my incompetence. “I’ll do it,” he said in an older-brother sort of voice, taking my place on the edge of the jetty. “I’ll use the landing net.”

“That’s no good,” I said. “It’s even shorter than the rod. You won’t reach.”

“I’ve got long arms,” said Pete as he flailed the net in the general direction of the errant float. Not long enough, I thought as the net fell at least two feet short.

I voiced my doubts: “That’s never going to work.”

“I know what I’m doing,” said Pete. “If I drag the net back towards me it will create a current and bring the float closer in.”  He leaned forward, extending the landing net as far as he could, dropped it into the water and dragged it back. The float moved obediently shoreward – about an inch shoreward.

“It’s working,” said Pete. “I just need to create a stronger current.” He repeated the movement several times. Pete is neither a small man nor is he in the first flush of youth (both of which statements – in fairness – could also be made about me). I was feeling grateful for his efforts to retrieve my float but at the same time I had an indefinable premonition of imminent catastrophe.

“I’ll steady you,” I said as Pete thrashed the water with increasing violence, apparently in the hope of creating a friendly tsunami that would wash the float ashore. I grasped the belt of his shorts firmly in my left hand and planted my feet wide apart on the jetty behind him. “O.K. I’ve got you.”

Pete seemed to take these words as an opportunity to test the laws of physics. He lunged forward in a manner reminiscent of a geriatric (and considerably overweight) Superman launching himself from the top of the Empire State Building. Sadly, I could not contain his super-hero powers and the belt wrenched free from my grasp as he did a swallow-dive into the water.

Fortunately it was only three feet deep and he quickly stood up. He turned back towards me, his water-logged hat drooping like elephant’s ears around his face. A sodden cigarette dangled lifeless from his lips. “You stupid bastard,’” he declared in a rather sharp (and, I thought, unnecessarily accusatory) tone.

But I had held on to Pete’s belt a fraction too long and the forward momentum that had catapulted him into the water had also dragged me to the very edge of the jetty, where I now teetered, windmilling my arms in an effort to shift my centre of gravity back over dry land.

I should not have laughed. I really should not have laughed. It was unkind of me. More importantly, hysterical laughter is not conducive to self-preservation. I lost the battle to maintain my balance. Soon, I discovered that I too was unable to fly and in seconds I was standing beside Pete, waist-deep in the lake. He handed me the float. “Here you are. I told you I could reach it.”

We waded to the jetty and heaved ourselves out of the water. I was laughing so much that I could hardly stand up. I couldn’t stop laughing. I laughed so hard that  it made me cry and hurt my chest. Eventually I caught my breath long enough to speak.

“Thanks for saving my float, Pete. Are you OK?”

“Yeah, I’m alright. But my wallet was in my pocket and everything is soaked: credit cards and all my money.”

“The money will dry out,” I said. “I’m pretty sure of that.”

I tried to recall what I had in my pockets. Some coins, a credit card (they would be OK, I thought) and my pocket watch. I pulled the watch out. It was dripping wet but still keeping time.  Somehow I had got away without any damaging anything.

“Look at us Pete. We should have a picture of this.” I reached for my iPhone, my hand instinctively remembering where it was: in the zipped pocket of my shorts. The cost of retrieving my float had just gone up by £173.

Some things are priceless.

I came across this picture of Holland House Library the other day. It was taken a day or two after it was bombed in a German air raid on 22 October 1940. I don’t know the identities of the three splendidly be-hatted men but if I had been around at the time I suspect that I too would not have been able to resist clambering over the wreckage to see what books had survived.

When I showed her this image, my friend Sue Hollingsworth from the International School of Storytelling reminded me of a story that she once told me and which we now both tell: The Philosophers Stone, which begins with the destruction of the ancient library at Alexandria in 48 BCE. In the story, a single fragment of papyrus survives the flames. On it is written the arcane secret of the philosopher’s stone that turns base metals to gold.

“What do you see when you look at the picture?” she asked me.

“Lots of things,” I replied. “The casual damage of war; the miraculous survival of the books; the curious detachment of the three men. It makes me think of my mother’s stories of living in London during the blitz. It reminds me that the fate of each of us hangs by a thread. What do you see?”

“It’s more what I don’t see,” said Sue. “There is no relationship between the men: they have no interest in each other, just the books. And there are no women in the picture. I wonder where they are? Clearing up the mess, probably.”

She was right, of course.

But I cannot help being fascinated by the books themselves. I like to think that books have lives of their own. They are conceived in the author’s imagination, are mid-wifed by the publisher and brought into the world by the printer. Some become hugely popular. Many sit on shelves unread. A precious few become companions for our whole lives. I still have a well-thumbed copy of E.B. White’s Stuart Little, given to me by my mother when I was 7 years old.

The image of Stuart Little, heading north in his car, not knowing if he would ever find his love Margalo but travelling with hope, has encouraged and sustained me for as long as I can remember. It is the one book I would hope to pull from the wreckage.

It is in a very real sense my philosopher’s stone.

What is yours, I wonder?

There is a well-known trust-building exercise in which a blindfolded person allows a sighted partner to lead them.  It can be a powerful experience to relinquish our visual sense and rely on someone else to take care of us. All too often however the exercise is done in a training room or in the course of a quick excursion into the grounds of a training venue.

Imagine how much more powerful it would be to do this exercise in a genuinely wild place, taking your time and with instructions to your sighted partner not just to lead you around but to bring you into delightful sensory contact with your environment. I was fortunate enough to have this experience (both of leading and being led) in a forest clearing in the Jura mountains a couple of weeks ago.

When blindfolded, I noticed how the temporary loss of my sight accentuated my chronically underused faculties of hearing, touch, taste and smell. Even now, I can clearly recall the pungent fragrance released by a small mushroom brushed by my fingers, the sound of chaffinches chirruping in the treetops, and the precise feel of grass, dry leaves, stones and pine cones under my feet. At the time I was acutely aware of the changing temperature on my skin as my partner led me in and out of the sunlight; I felt the breeze on my cheeks shifting direction as I turned; I developed a different sense of presence as I tried to stretch out my non-visual senses to anticipate proximity with rocks and trees.

Just before my blindfold was removed, I reached out and found myself touching someone’s hands. For a few moments I experienced them as the hands not of another human being but simply those of a fellow primate. Then suddenly I could see again. I looked into the face of the person whose hands I was now holding and laughter came out of our mouths: a sound that we two-leggeds sometimes make when we meet each other in the forest.

To become fully human, says David Abram (in the opening paragraph of his new book Becoming Animal) we must own up to being an animal, a creature of earth. And it is hard to do that with any conviction in the middle of a city – and almost impossible in a hermetically sealed office or hotel room.