Speaker’s corner
THE Jews have a saying: “Wherever you go, there you are – your luggage is another story.” Airport baggage is a mystery. I never complain when my case takes a long time before making its appearance on the carousel. I am just terribly relieved when I see it and, I must confess, not a little amazed.
After all, since leaving the aircraft I would have walked through tunnels, up escalators, along passages, though passport control – a good kilometre by my reckoning – and suddenly my bag comes bumping towards me on the conveyor belt like a long-lost pet. I sometimes French kiss it when I see it. Not that everything always goes smoothly. Remember London’s Heathrow Terminal Five debacle and that growing mountain of unsorted luggage.
An old friend and former colleague, Peter Sullivan, got to know the late Peter Ustinov while at a World Economic Forum in Davos some years back. Ustinov told him how, at Heathrow airport’s check-in counter, he told the hostess: “I want my big bag to go to Hong Kong please, and the small bag to go to Los Angeles, and this bag…”
She interrupted, saying, “We can’t do that, sir.”
Ustinov said, “Why not? You somehow managed to do it last time!”
Airlines the world over are becoming worried about the amount and the weight of carry-on luggage that passengers are trying to wedge into the overhead storage bins. A friend was on a bumpy flight a few years ago when a television set fell from an overhead rack and seriously injured a passenger.
When on a local flight I try to avoid putting anything into the hold. This is a huge saving of time. It enables me, when I reach my destination, to leap off the plane, cut through the airport like a knife through butter and be first at the exit doors, all smug and pleased with myself like Mr Bean.
It enabled me, a couple of years ago, to break a record getting from Durban Airport to my home in Sandton, north of Johannesburg. The plane left at 6pm and, by 7.20pm, I was 600km away distributing airline snacks to my whimpering family.
This was because of a wind-assisted flight and a straight-in approach on to a southerly aligned runway.
It was a memorable flight: as soon as we reached cruising altitude, the cabin crew began serving snacks and wine. At the same time the pilot announced: “Er… ladies and er gentlemen… this is your… er… captain. We will shortly begin our descent to er… (long pause) er, Johannesburg International, eight minutes ahead of schedule.”
“Eight minutes ahead of schedule,” I thought. “That’ll bring us down in Alberton.”
Minutes later the hostesses, having just served our meals, came to take them away. It took all four of them to take mine. But we were discussing cabin luggage. I would be pleased if airlines cracked down on extra heavy cabin baggage because it will save us travellers a lot of self-inflicted agony – the agony of pretending one’s seriously overweight cabin bag weighs hardly anything at all. A dead giveaway is the way some people’s neck veins stand out like hawsers and little founts of perspiration spurt from their foreheads every time they take up their bags.
I sometimes have to psyche myself up by shouting “Haai!” just to lift mine clear of the ground.
Some peashooter!: In South Africa we tend to use pumpkins to hold down corrugated roofs but, annually, outside the small American town of Millsboro, Delaware, more than 100 teams gather for the Punkin Chunkin. It is to see whose machine can toss a 5kg pumpkin farthest. No explosives are allowed. In 2013 a compressed air cannon with a 46m barrel – imagine! – shot a pumpkin 1 690m to establish a world record.
What a marvellous idea for some little town in KwaZulu-Natal to make its name.