So, on my recent BA189 flight from Heathrow to Newark, I found myself seated next to an English girl, perhaps a few years older than me, who possessed an American-sized engagement ring and an interesting portfolio of the artistic type. She was also wearing cool trainers, and it occurred to me that it would be nice to speak to her. I always feel like going west takes FOREVER and a little conversation to pass the time is always welcome. But months in the UK have taught me that one doesn't speak to strangers unless certain conditions are met, so our interchanges were limited to "excuse me" and "thanks" and the like as we passed to and from the loo.
Then, as the plane neared Newark, one of the conditions for conversation was met. It began to get scary. After the crew was seated for landing, the plane began to ride like a bucking bronco as it descended through dense clouds and high winds. There was rollercoaster-esque semi-screaming from the passengers and a vertiginous drop in the pit of my stomach. The lack of encouraging words from the flight deck did not help matters. Cool-trainers-girl and I peered out the window at the circling clouds and looked at our journey monitors, which seemed to indicate the plane beating an increasingly jagged path in the direction of Philadelphia. I was beginning to wonder if someone had broken into the cockpit, perhaps planning to fly us into City Hall or the Amtrak building, when:
Cool-trainers-girl: This landing is crazy!
Me: Yes. It is.
Cool-trainers-girl: It's never like this.
Me: I know. I would feel much better if they'd just tell us everything's under control.
Cool-trainers-girl: Do you think it's the wind?
Me: They did say it would be windy when we took off.
And that was it. Apart from expressing our relief at being once more on the ground, we didn't speak again. The interaction occurred only when necessary, only when the least rational and most paranoid parts of our brains were thinking things along the lines of "what if this plane crashes?"
The experience made me think of a play I directed in November. It's called Neither Here Nor There and is about Italian immigrants to the UK in the years leading up to WWII. The war starts, Italian businesses are vandalized and the Italian men are shipped off as POWs on a recomissioned cruise ship that's torpedoed en route to Canada (the Navy forgot to mark it with a red cross to indicate prisoners were on board). Back in London, the blitz is underway, and as the women left behind have to deal with the rubble, suddenly the Italians aren't such a problem. Suddenly it's okay to talk to them, to be comrades in arms. Everyone's rendered equal by the shared tragedy.
The same thing happens on the tube today – no one speaks until you're stopped in a tunnel, or fined by a ticket inspector, or in a carriage where a Portuguese teenager leaves a bag on the train and you have to have a debate about whether or not to pull the emergency alarm. A disaster – whether large or small in scale – is all that's needed to precipitate conversation.
Take the recent snowfall – at the start of February, London had a proper snowstorm. It was lovely. Best of all, it made people lovely. Suddenly everyone was talking to everyone else. I was asked to photograph two different groups of people while walking home from Hammersmith. They were people I didn't know! Neighbors I hadn't met before were building snowmen in their front gardens. It made me wish London could be perpetually blanketed in snow. The snowstorm-as-conversation-starter argument may initially seem to contradict the comrades-in-arms theory, but actually they blend perfectly. The snow was technically a common enemy, but one we were all happy to lose to, since losing in this case was actually to win: a day off work, a day to sleep in, a day to build snow creatures, a day to bask in the warm glow and bonhomie that comes with confronting the enemy.
These interactions are so pleasant, and such a change from the norm, that it makes me wonder if I could somehow perpetually manufacture mini-disasters. I would make so many friends! On my travels through London, I could spill several coffees a day, break heels and trip down the escalators in the tube. I could also just hope for more snow. Or perhaps move to a somewhat friendlier place.
No comments:
Post a Comment