New World Symphony

Nick M, at Counting Cats, on the USA:

I have been back to the USA of course because it’s ace. I know loads of folks who haven’t. Why?

I have been to the USA once, on business. Even if I were still allowed to fly I doubt that I’d ever go back there.

The plane took off from Heathrow only after an extended Asian family (of about 30 people) had been stopped from conducting an improvised cooking session in the gangways using Camping Gaz cookers. As soon as the wheels were off the ground, they were at it again. Eventually they were replete, and stopped cooking; however, the remainder of the interminable flight was pre-empted by a Modern Mother from Australia, who cooed lovingly as her repellent child rushed around the interior of the aircraft screaming, and trying to force open the doors and smash the windows. On final approach to New York the headphones were playing The Ride of the Valkyries, presumably to accustom one to the personal style of the airport goons.

Having been admitted to the country with only modest harrassment and bullying (the result of having the business cards of the very large American corporation for which I worked) I then had to catch an internal flight. This involved being sent repeatedly fom one end to the other of an airport, the charming 1950s architecture of which was not improved by having in it perhaps 300 times the number of people for which it had been designed. The temperature and humidity were extremely high. Whenever I arrived at a desk, they would send me back to a different desk at the other end of the airport, against the clock, but not before saying, in every case, “Hey, take it easy! You gonna have a heart attack.” It was like that scene in one of Clint Eastwood’s films where he is running all over San Francisco looking for ringing phone boxes. While scurrying about, dragging my belongings, I could not help noticing that everyone in New York makes as much noise as they can, all the time, many having been issued with noisemakers for the purpose.

Eventually I managed to penetrate the interior of one of the famous but tiny buildings, in which a number of people were standing in litter-bins frantically auctioning tickets, and contrived to board what I was lucky enough to discover was the right aircraft.

Unfortunately it didn’t go anywhere. They were waiting for a takeoff slot. So we waited, and waited, as the aircraft internal temperature inexorably approached the engine exhaust temperature. During this time the chief stewardess mercilessly nagged the captain through the open cockpit door. After some hours of this the captain received clearance to taxi, provided that he made it snappy, and the aircraft set off hastily towards the runway, back-seat driven by the chief stewardess (“Hey, that’s the wrong way! We always turn left here! Goddammit, will you look where you’re going? You nearly hit that guy!”).

This flight was brief, the destination being relatively close to New York, which was fortunate owing to much of the fuel having already been expended. Even so, it was pitch dark by the time we got there.

The regional airport was, essentially, closed. I was supposed to collect a hire car. There was still someone at the car hire office, just shutting the place up. Of course the paperwork had been buggered up and had to be straightened out. Eventually I traipsed out with bag and baggage into the pouring rain, to locate in an unlit and unpaved parking lot a thing called a Mercury Cougar, which seemed to resemble in some ways a Scorpio Granada.

Unfortunately it wasn’t a Granada. It refused to go when asked to go, on the grounds (it appeared) that it was unhappy about things to do with safety. I had to get in and out of it several times; it didn’t, for example, like to have the key put in the ignition before it detected someone sitting on the driver’s seat. Finally, by now soaking wet and shivering, I persuaded it of my bona fides.

Immediately, with a dramatic ringing of an hitherto unheard bell, an electric motor wrapped a seat belt around my neck. Had I been any taller, I should have been unable to escape it, and would probably have been garrotted on the spot.

Eventually (being an experienced technical author) I managed to establish the correct operating sequence and got the doors shut, the seat belt on and the engine started. At this point I just sat in the thing for ten minutes, smoking a cigarette. To my surprise the car (which forbade smoking) failed to detect this; had it not done so I imagine that I should have been immediately ejected.

There remained only the task of driving the thing some tens of miles, on the wrong side of the road, in the middle of the night, and in a heavy rainstorm, to find the appointed hotel. The car handled, as we British automotive constructors precisely put it, ‘like a hot prick in a tub of lard’. Its substantial engine had been so crippled by emissions-control equipment that its performance suggested something more like a Trabant. The only thing that worked well was the air-conditioning, which I couldn’t switch off.

Having, thanks no doubt to British Army training, succeeded in orienteering my way to the hotel, I was greeted by a bored, gum-chewing youth who told me that I need not have walked half a mile around the enormous place in the rain because there was a side door right next to the parking lot and to the elevator which came up alongside my room. I had taken it for a fire-escape. “Oh, it is,” he said.

It was now the early hours of the morning. Before collapsing I decided that I had to have a shower. The shower was a masterpiece of American plumbing and its controls resembled those of a moderately sized ocean liner’s engine-room. None was marked in any way.

Selecting a control at random, I operated it, and was immediately felled by jets of superheated steam.

The following day, for therapeutic reasons, I decided to have a pizza. I am very fond of pizza. There was a pizza place across the road from the hotel. I walked over there. This was a mistake.

The first thing they said to me, as soon as I walked in through the door, was “Where’s your car?”

“Over there,” I said, pointing at it in the hotel’s parking lot on the other side of the road. “As you can see, it is less far to walk from the hotel to here than it is from the hotel to the car.”

“You’re English.”

“There appears to be nothing that I can conceal from you. I have come here out of London, England in order to sample what I am reliably informed are the finest pizzas on the eastern seaboard of the Continental United States.”

So I got a pizza, which I carried back in triumph to the hotel; indeed, on returning to the place some days later, it turned out that they had believed every word and supposed me to be some sort of international investigator from the pizza equivalent of the Guide Michelin. The head of the whole pizza chain had turned up, and was all over me like a cheap suit. I got lots of pizza-related cultural artefacts (fridge magnets and whatnot).

Despite the tactical success at the pizza joint the remainder of the operation was uniformly depressing.

The purpose of my presence was highly technical and was to do with the compatibility of television and computer processes. Essentially they told me that what I had already done was technically impossible and that the only way for the project to proceed was for them to take it over and do it all again, their way. I omitted this item from my report and my own unit eventually proceeded to achieve the technical objective at a very greatly reduced cost.

Having, as they supposed, dissuaded me from doing in a fortnight with one British fellow in a Hut what could so easily be done in a couple of years by a thousand Americans in a vast, windowless, airconditioned building (the building in question was, like those in the airport, famous; it was the original and definitive case of ‘Sick Building Syndrome’), they proceeded to train me in the operation of some software which was long obsolete before the project ever started; I never really did find out why.

And the car continued to be itself. One day, on one of the endless straight rural roads, I opened it right up to see what I could get out of it. About 56mph seemed to be its lot. At this point I passed a parked car marked ‘State Troopers’, with a fellow in a cowboy hat asleep inside it. The following morning another car, marked ‘Sherriff’, was waiting outside the hotel, and followed me to work.

Constant recollection of various POW films maintained what was left of my morale until the glorious day when I was allowed to go home. I gladly returned the gutless car to the airport, and rejoiced in what seemed to be a relatively easy connecting flight to New York. The plane back to Heathrow even took off on time.

Then, somewhere over the Atlantic, it started turning right.

It kept on doing this. Lacking a compass, I couldn’t be sure, but I got the impression that if the captain carried on at this rate we’d be landing somewhere in Africa. Then I noticed that the chap in the seat next to me was sweating copiously, and praying.

I looked out of the window. To the left of the aircraft was a body of cloud. One does not usually see clouds of this form rising as far as the stratosphere, let alone well above an aircraft at FL300+. After some detective work around the aeroplane (which contained several more praying people) it emerged that this was the last flight of the day to have left New York to attempt to traverse ‘the steep Atlantick stream’, owing to the presence of an hurricane. Apparently the only reason it had taken off at all was that Tina Turner, the famous American chanteuse, was in first class and the entire media pack was waiting for her at Heathrow, and the airline didn’t want to look silly by cancelling her flight.

The diversion around the hurricane took some time, so on arriving over the UK the captain elected to fly at a fine speed in the nap of the earth all the way to Heathrow, where the aircraft landed, still at a fine speed, without any of the usual aerial ballet. The other passengers were praying, still, this time thanking various deities for their deliverance from the hurricane; I, on the other hand, being familiar with the geography of Heathrow and the mechanical laws of Sir Isaac Newton, was offering suggestions such as “Brakes? Brakes! Reverse thrust, for crying out loud!”. The aeroplane eventually shuddered to a halt a few feet from the end of the runway, and with some difficulty turned sharply to taxi away.

At the terminal we were all made to stay in the aeroplane until Ms. Turner and her entourage had left the airport, whereupon we were released.

Having at last recovered my luggage, all that remained was to get through Customs. I had nothing to declare. Accordingly I dragged my kit into the appropriate customs hall, at the far end of which were two specimens of the typical British Customs Officer: little round fellows of a vaguely naval aspect, with looks on their faces of permanent suspicion.

However, they took one look at me and waved me through. As I staggered out, one of them smiled, and essayed a small mock-salute.

I am, of course, prepared to accept that people have been to the USA and have been quite happy with the result, but would prefer on the whole not to repeat the experiment myself.