Travelling John Rogers 2016

Travels 2016

Chapter 1 - The Adventure Begins

An alarm bell is ringing. I am dreaming and the ringing is part of the dream. There is no let up  and I am forced to rouse myself. It is dark and I am awake in the bed of the Changi Airport Transit Hotel room I have rented for four hours between two flights taking me from Australia to London. I have only been asleep for an hour and a half, the bedside digital clock says, barely time for real refreshment. The temptation is to go back to sleep but I dare not. What if the staff on the front desk forget to phone with the pre-arranged wake up call and I miss the call to board the next flight?

I turn the television on and I am transformed into Bill Murray’s character in the film Lost In Translation. Like him but not in a Tokyo hotel I am unable to go back to sleep. He surfs the television channels in his room, wracked by jet lag. The light from the screen he is watching is garish, glaring. So is the TV in my Changi airport room. The sound is jangling, channels of TV advertisements, game shows with laughing hosts and guests, re-runs of “The Samurai” in black and white. What was it that Neil Finn of Crowded House said in one of his brilliant songs about “51 channels and there’s nothing on”? Fortunately for Bill Murray’s character, an ageing TV star flown to Japan to make a commercial for Japanese whiskey, he makes the innocent  acquaintance of a young American woman, played by Scarlett Johannsen, lonely like himself in a foreign city while her new husband, a photographer is away on assignment. The actor and the young bride form a bond, become friends united by the ordeal of people away from home.

There is no Scarlett here and I have no time to feel lonely or feel anything apart from weariness and the urge to make my short time here as bearable as possible. Bill Murray fades away. Perhaps he wilI return later. I leave my room and walk through the airport terminal to buy a new electric razor and a cup of absolutely awful coffee sold fraudulently under the banner of “Paul’s”, a French coffee and baguette chain. It helps break some of the monotony of the terminal’s artificial surroundings, this cathedral to consumerism really or perhaps unreally offering only meagre distraction.  

Finally after walking through some of the shopping arcade I go back to my room to have a shower. The boarding call comes for the next leg of the journey.

Despite a nagging fatigue I am unable to really sleep between Singapore and London. Drifting in and out of ‘cat naps’, reading The Straits Times with music from the on-board entertainment channel puts me into a trance.

The trance lifts and fades with a life of its own as my eyes open occasionally and scan the pages of The Straits Times on my lap. I become aware of how much the events which make news in other countries do not receive attention on the general Australian media. Another Mrs Gandhi, Sonia, the widow of assassinated former PM Rajiv Gandhi is combatting yet again allegations over her allegiance to India because of her Italian birth political life and the so-called AgustaWestland payoff scandal through her Italian connections. I can’t recall this rating a mention even on SBS television. Not surprising really with the consumption of media time in Australia with the nail biting finish to the 2016 federal election campaign.

Noise cancelling earphones shut out the drone of the London-bound jet and I drift into music while making a half-hearted attempt to read a newspaper. It is a minute by minute affair with the words on the page and the music in my ears. Leonard Cohen, whose birthplace in Canada I hope to visit on this adventure, sings words I haven’t heard before, so recent is my discovery of his songs through interpretations by others and then by searching for his original versions. “I don’t like your fashions Mr, I don’t like the things that make you thin”. It is a protest against hard drug taking. Cohen is nailing it with lyrics as sharp as a razor, referring to someone unknown who leads a way of life he obviously has “issues” with. “First we take Manhattan and then we take Berlin”, repeating the line at the end of each chorus.

The voice of the aircraft pilot breaks into my earphones warning of ten minutes of possible turbulence ahead. Spookily the next voice in my ears is an unknown singer belting out a version of The Beatles’ Helter Skelter. I hope his words are not some portent -”when I get to the bottom, I get back to the top”. I look around to see what other people are doing. TV screens are glowing. Kate Winslett is making her first entrance in The Dressmaker on one screen across the aisle. Another screen goes down a time tunnel showing a much younger Kate in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. The activities of a quite different woman fill the second page of my newspaper. British Prime Ministerial contender Theresa May is quoted in a prominent article as describing politics as practised by men as “a game”. She promises “a greater focus on delivery”. Mrs May is not Margaret Thatcher but comparisons will be made.

Bob Dylan is now growling in my ears “there’s no success like failure and failure’s no success at all”. Not relevant perhaps to current British politics but Mrs May will have heard “the answer my friend is blowing in the wind” even if as a young conservative she may not have agreed with the full point of the Dylan lyrics of the 1960s. But perhaps, like Jim Carrey in Eternal Sunshine the words may have been carried on a weird gale blowing through a “portal” from the pages of my newspaper.

Drifting off again I dream of the comical Boris Johnson, also a reported British PM contender, walking as the top dog through the door of Number 10 Downing Street. Not impossible. He would certainly be an amusing leader and perhaps able eventually to fill outgoing PM David Cameron’s shoes post-Brexit with the help of advisers as some critics of one-time US President Ronald Reagan believe that former B-grade actor did.

The TV screen of the passenger next to me is now showing Helen Mirren in military uniform as commander of a mission by remote control to kill a group of suicide bombers in a village in Kenya. I tune my earphones to the film and hear Helen’s character, oddly named Colonel Katherine Powell, going close to her Jane Tennison character in Prime Suspect. Back to the music, I may watch the film later.

It is discovery time as it so often is for me when listening to music carefully programmed for on-board entertainment channels. Harry Nilsson, under the influence of something including his good friend John Lennon and possibly a few drinks, is my choice as I open my appreciation potential wider than the few 1960s hit records I know Nilsson for. Save the Last Dance for Me is being given a stunning and very slow emotional treatment, like a different song to the original version by The Drifters. I am again at one with the music and the comfortable feeling takes me off to sleep again to be woken it seems minutes later by the aircraft pilot’s voice asking for seatbelts to be buckled for the approach to London Heathrow.

To be continued.