I’m not one for bashing the ear of the poor bod who happens to be seated beside me during a flight, but for a long flight I generally introduce myself to my neighbour as a courtesy. Most of my travelling neighbours have been business or professional people like myself, with plenty to occupy their minds during their flight. Just sometimes, however, I have chanced upon a real surprise sitting next to me. Here are two examples:
1. On QF64, JNB – SYD, about 18 months ago, my neighbour was Reg, a weather-beaten, gruff type whom I took to be a South African farmer. I was wrong. He happened to be a Zimbabwean lawyer, one of the dwindling white population left in Harare. He mentioned that he was en route from Harare to Honiara. I commented, in jocular fashion, “Reg, you must be the first person in the history of aviation to have bought a ticket to fly from Harare to Honiara. What takes you there?” “Oh,” he replied, matter-of-factly, “there is an election coming up in the Solomon Islands, and I am an international election observer sent in by the UN.” It struck me as particularly incongruous that at the very moment that Robert Mugabe was persecuting whites and rigging elections, here was someone chosen from right under his nose to oversee elections elsewhere.
2. On QF41, SYD – CGK, about 6 months ago, my neighbour was an introverted 40-ish American who clearly preferred not to talk, at least until he saw me reading an engineering article which contained a few mathematical equations. Then he became most animated. He had a PhD in mechanical engineering and had taught transient analysis in high speed rotating systems (vibrations in fans, to the uninitiated) at Virginia Tech. A confirmed bachelor, he had been living in the wilds of Irian Jaya for four years, analysing the behaviour of high-powered fans in a deep underground mine. I swear that he was the only person who has ever quoted second-order differential equations to me in the course of normal speech. Of course, being a mere civil engineer, I didn’t have the slightest idea what point he was trying to make, but I nodded politely in response to his enthusiasm. In an attempt to bring the conversation back to earth, I asked where in USA he had grown up. “Alaska, near Anchorage,” he replied. It was not long after the US Presidential election, so I asked him what he thought of his fellow Alaskan, Sarah Palin. Then a deep frown crossed his brow and he lamented that America had lost a great opportunity to elect a giant of a leader. “So what do you think of Barak Obama?” I asked. “I worry that he just hasn’t got enough up top” was his reply. It made me wonder how anyone could have such insights into the inanimate world, but be so lacking in judgement of humans.
OK, there are my two stories. You must have all had some off-beat or strange or inspiring or impressive neighbours of your own. Care to share them? In particular, did anyone ever have the luck(?) to be seated next to Martin Bryant, of Port Arthur fame, who reportedly made numerous around-the-world trips, J class, without any stopovers, during the year before the massacre, simply because it gave him someone to talk to for hours on end?
1. On QF64, JNB – SYD, about 18 months ago, my neighbour was Reg, a weather-beaten, gruff type whom I took to be a South African farmer. I was wrong. He happened to be a Zimbabwean lawyer, one of the dwindling white population left in Harare. He mentioned that he was en route from Harare to Honiara. I commented, in jocular fashion, “Reg, you must be the first person in the history of aviation to have bought a ticket to fly from Harare to Honiara. What takes you there?” “Oh,” he replied, matter-of-factly, “there is an election coming up in the Solomon Islands, and I am an international election observer sent in by the UN.” It struck me as particularly incongruous that at the very moment that Robert Mugabe was persecuting whites and rigging elections, here was someone chosen from right under his nose to oversee elections elsewhere.
2. On QF41, SYD – CGK, about 6 months ago, my neighbour was an introverted 40-ish American who clearly preferred not to talk, at least until he saw me reading an engineering article which contained a few mathematical equations. Then he became most animated. He had a PhD in mechanical engineering and had taught transient analysis in high speed rotating systems (vibrations in fans, to the uninitiated) at Virginia Tech. A confirmed bachelor, he had been living in the wilds of Irian Jaya for four years, analysing the behaviour of high-powered fans in a deep underground mine. I swear that he was the only person who has ever quoted second-order differential equations to me in the course of normal speech. Of course, being a mere civil engineer, I didn’t have the slightest idea what point he was trying to make, but I nodded politely in response to his enthusiasm. In an attempt to bring the conversation back to earth, I asked where in USA he had grown up. “Alaska, near Anchorage,” he replied. It was not long after the US Presidential election, so I asked him what he thought of his fellow Alaskan, Sarah Palin. Then a deep frown crossed his brow and he lamented that America had lost a great opportunity to elect a giant of a leader. “So what do you think of Barak Obama?” I asked. “I worry that he just hasn’t got enough up top” was his reply. It made me wonder how anyone could have such insights into the inanimate world, but be so lacking in judgement of humans.
OK, there are my two stories. You must have all had some off-beat or strange or inspiring or impressive neighbours of your own. Care to share them? In particular, did anyone ever have the luck(?) to be seated next to Martin Bryant, of Port Arthur fame, who reportedly made numerous around-the-world trips, J class, without any stopovers, during the year before the massacre, simply because it gave him someone to talk to for hours on end?
