Travel: places make it. And people even more

Travel, they say, broadens the mind. I suppose it does that because it exposes you to different experiences. And to different people.

For instance, my team was recently asked to send someone to work in India. That’s not our territory. But we were happy to help and one of my colleagues went. It was a week of hard work but he found it rewarding. On his return, he remarked ‘it’s the first time I’ve taken a three-and-a-half hour flight and left the plane in the same country I took off from.’

Obviously, there are other places where it can happen. Russia. China. The United States where, even without including Alaska or Hawaii, you can get even longer flights: for instance, 6 hours 35 minutes from Miami to Seattle.

But in our little countries of Western Europe and the Mediterranean basin, it’s unlikely. Though for a moment I thought it had happened a while back. I’d caught a plane home from Spain. As we landed, a cabin attendant welcomed us ‘to Madrid’.

But then she was Spanish and perhaps anxious to get home, which may have caused the slip. Flying two and a half hours from Madrid only to find ourselves back there would have been a little surprising. Though the French air traffic controllers were doing their best, by indulging in their traditional pastime around major holidays, of going on strike.

That trip wasn’t only significant for its geographical aspects. It was also a fine example of travel bringing me into contact with other people. Two of them, in this instance. On the train home from the airport.

The first was Sandeep. It was 10:00 at night and he’d been working since 8:00 that morning, though he was clearly using the word ‘work’ in a loose sense. He was obviously, as he later confirmed, in a well-lubricated state. Indeed, he was carrying a wine bottle only half full, and a couple of plastic glasses, one of which contained part of the other half.

‘Are you taking this train to Bedford?’ he asked me.

It struck me as an odd formulation of the question. But I had a straightforward answer, so I gave it.

‘No,’ I said, ‘to Luton.’

He had a brief moment of anxiety before asking the obvious follow-up.

‘But does the train go to Bedford?’

‘I hope so,’ I told him helpfully, ‘or I’m on the wrong train.’

That answer seemed to satisfy him because he sank onto a chair across the aisle from me.

‘Thank God,’ he said, ‘I’m a bit pissed and I couldn’t work out which train I needed to take. Glass of wine?’

I managed to resist the temptation of warm white wine out of a plastic glass and we got into conversation. Which meant that he talked to me – or at me – while I nodded at appropriate points. I even tried to say the odd word to encourage him, but he needed no encouragement and talked right through any remarks of mine.

The second person was Ryan. At first he walked up and down the carriage several times, I assume to see if he could find any congenial company, and eventually decided that there was nothing better on offer than us.

‘Well,’ he said, ‘this sounds like a good on-going conversation.’

Clearly, he had the same notion as Sandeep of what constituted a conversation.

‘Mind if I join you?’ he went on, sitting down without waiting for a response, and picking up Sandeep’s wine bottle which he examined critically. He didn’t seem to share my reticence over absorbing its contents, so went on without pausing to another question, ‘mind if I have a drop of your wine?’

Sandeep clearly felt he was not being allowed to play his role of host as fully as he liked, so rather than sitting back and letting Ryan help himself, he poured him a generous plastic glass full. A clearly hospitable man, I decided, since he had presumably only brought the second plastic glass to entertain such guests as Ryan.

‘Good Lord! Not that much!’ said Ryan, but he raised his glass to our health, accompanying the gesture with a beaming smile, so I suspect he wasn’t as unhappy about the quantity as his words suggested.

‘I’m a bit pissed,’ he added, rather unnecessarily.

Travel companions: Ryan (left) and Sandeep

At this point, Sandeep managed to regain control of proceedings. He regaled us all the way to St Alban’s, where Ryan left, with a convoluted tale of how he’d forgotten his phone in a tube train the night before. I won’t bore you with the details, but just cut to the finish: he’d left it next to a colleague who had, fortunately, spotted it and brought it back for him the following day, even though he was officially on leave and the round trip took him three hours. What I’ve told you in less than a sentence, Sandeep managed to make last the full twenty-five minutes to St Alban’s.

After Ryan left, Sandeep decided to tell me a little about himself. He’d spent five years as a software developer on contracts, earning £580 a day.

‘Work it out,’ he said.

I had. He’d been making nearly £12,000 a month. As much in two months as the median annual income of British employees. But then he’d decided that he’d had enough of the existence and had taken a job as an employee again, cutting his earnings by two-thirds. He’d recently been promoted to lead a team, and was finding the stress difficult to handle. Could it be the team that had taken him drinking, what with Christmas so close? And the stress that had him hitting the bottle so hard?

But there was an issue that was bothering me. He was clearly of Indian extraction and drinking. Since I’m a complete stranger to tact, I asked him, ‘You’re not a Muslim, are you?’

‘No,’ he said, and then with a little pride, ‘I’m a Sikh.’

He explained that he’d used his years on high earnings to buy property.

‘Three houses and an off-licence,’ he told me. ‘The off-licence is for my Dad. He’s retired but he’s a shopkeeper at heart – he was one for years and he hates not having a shop to look after. So now he runs the offie.’

And the other three houses? Rented, naturally. It’s something that quite a few members of the Indian community seem to do: get into property quickly. A smart move. I don’t know what may happen post-Brexit, but housing does seem to be an excellent investment, one that holds its value far better than most.

‘My Dad owns nineteen houses,’ Sandeep added. Leaving me wondering why I hadn’t bought a couple more when I’d had a chance. Too late now, alas.

Interesting, anyway. As curious as long flights that leave you in the same country. A conversation that opened my eyes to other ways of doing things, and therefore broadened my mind.

Besides, he was likeable, Sandeep. Fun to be with. I’ll raise a glass to him over the holidays. One actually made of glass. And the white wine in it will be chilled.

The memory of an entertaining encounter will make it taste all the better.

We all need Obama to step up to this presidential legacy

For my introduction to politics, few experiences can have been as seminal, in my delicate formative years, than seeing posters proclaiming the president of the United States a traitor to his nation.

Shocking sight for an impressionable 10-year old

Since he was assassinated the following day and, even at 10 years of age, I had grasped the fact that an only recently abolished tradition made the sentence for treason death, I could hardly fail to associate the poster with the execution. My parents were horrified but, even without their example, I think I would have been just as shocked myself.

Why am I talking about this now? Partly because we are in the middle of the fiftieth anniversary of the Cuban missile crisis, when that President, John Kennedy, stared done Kruschev and drove him to withdraw Soviet missiles from the island. He did that without firing a single shot or mobilising a single soldier.

It was one of the accusations on the poster: ‘Missile removal - Cuba’ appear among the examples of the ‘innumerable issues’ on which JFK had been wrong (or rather, WRONG). Funnily enough, most of us who lived through the crisis rather thought he’d got it right, and were grateful that he’d found a way out without precipitating a third world war.

Which brings me to the other reason why I’m talking about this now. Last Thursday Joe Biden and Paul Ryan met in the Vice Presidential debate for the 2012 US election. Among other things, Ryan criticised the Obama administration for having ‘called Bashar Assad a reformer when he was turning his Russian-provided guns on his own people’. It’s not strictly true: Hillary Clinton said that people had regarded Assad as possibly a reformer, but that was rather a long time before he’d turned his guns on his people.

However, it isn’t Ryan’s mendacity that interests me here. It’s the implicit accusation that the Obama team is soft on Syria. He wants to get harder? He doesn’t feel that we’ve had about as many entanglements in the Middle East as we need? He thinks the other ones have worked out just dandy for us?

Perhaps he feels it’s time to be more supportive of the friends of the US and tougher on its enemies. That was a concern of the authors of that poster all those years ago: ‘He is betraying our friends (Cuba, Katanga, Portugal) and befriending our enemies (Russia, Yugoslavia, Poland).’

In particular, Ryan’s not keen on working through the United Nations or, as he put it on Thursday, ‘outsourcing our foreign policy to the UN.’ This reprises a theme he announced in August, when he pointed out that the ‘Obama foreign policy is to subjugate ourselves to the United Nations, which gives Russia and China a veto power at the Security Council’.

Curiously, the authors of the JFK poster wrote ‘he is turning the sovereignty of the U.S. over to the communist controlled United Nations.’ It’s less fashionable than then to accuse people of communism, but in other respects the idea is the same.

All this is causing bells to jangle in my mind. Perhaps Ryan is a less extreme version of the men behind the ‘Treason’ poster, but his thinking’s very much the same. And I remember that Kennedy had the strength to stand by his position but also the strength to resist the siren calls of the hawks.

Just imagine if he hadn’t. The world might have seen the outbreak of a most disastrous war. And for what? Just over a quarter of a century later, the Soviet world collapsed anyway when the Berlin wall came down.

And look what happened when he didn’t resist hard enough: the US found itself embroiled in a long, bitter and bloody war in Vietnam which delivered his country its first defeat.

Today, in a world not much less dangerous than in 1962, I want more of the Kennedy who knew how to resist calls for military action over Cuba, less of the one who took the US deeper into the fighting in Indochina. And certainly nothing at all of the men who denounced him.

This evening Obama faces Romney for his second debate. Ryan has shown that his ticket belongs to the tainted tradition that in its time produced the ‘Treason’ poster. Obama has on more than one occasion shown the guts of a latter-day Kennedy.

I watched Obama in 2008 and he was inspirational. In his campaigning, he was already a worthy successor of JFK. But what happened at the last debate with Romney? Why didn’t Obama wipe the floor with him like Kennedy did with Nixon?

The Obama of 2008 didn’t show up then. He’d better be there tonight. Because I’ve known since I was ten that letting the other lot get anywhere near the levers of power is a recipe for catastrophe. For the US, of course; but for all the rest of us too.