Miss Australia 1978 – Part One of Four

If we were allowed to make up our own birth signs I reckon I’d probably go for Hermes (not herpes) because in Greek mythology, he was the god of travel and a lot of Greek mythology is set in Bulgaria where I live and I feel it’s nice to patronise the locals.

I’ve never been any good at staying in the same place for very long. You could say I’ve been around a bit in my time. I’m always itching to see what’s round the next corner, no matter where I am, even if I’ve only recently arrived from round the previous corner. Wherever I lay my woolly Leeds United scarf, that’s my home! To be set on with the task of being god of travel I expect you’d have to have the same problem (though I no longer see it as a problem now that I’ve been round so many corners). I wonder if this was something encountered by Hermes (not Hermesetas) during his time as a divine being.

As a consequence of not being able to sit still I’ve travelled on a lot of aeroplanes where you do have to sit still but it turns out to be worth it in the end. I’ve emptied my pockets, taken my boots and belt off and placed all my fluids in clear plastic bags hundreds of times. I’ve manoeuvred red hot chicken and vegetables from countless little foil dishes to my mouth or the front of my trousers using cutlery made from a material not as tough as the chicken itself and with my elbows simultaneously trapped just above my hips as if in a sort of a straitjacket situation but probably not as comfortable. Although the main meat (or meat substitute) bit of an in-flight meal only weighs round about sixty or seventy grams, I’ve calculated that down the years I have consumed enough of this stuff to reconstruct a whole flock of chickens, most of a heifer or a mushroom cloud. The various slices of vacuum packed cake that have passed through my digestive system at forty thousand feet would cumulatively amount to something akin to Kim Kardashian’s wedding cake, I’ve consumed enough strawberry fool to float the General Belgrano and, to my horror, disposed of enough single-use plastic to construct a full scale model of a Boeing 747.

My carbon footprint must be at least a size twelve but, in my defence, I would put forward the notion that for a lot of the years in which I was flying around the world people just weren’t aware that they had carbon feet. It’s a relatively recent thing and the past can’t be changed. I worry about greenhouse gas emissions to the extent that I’ve never given in to Priyatelkata’s pestering for us to have a greenhouse in our garden but, as I see it, a plane that I’m sitting on for any given journey would still be going to wherever it’s going to, even if I wasn’t on it. But introducing an extra greenhouse to the world is a different kettle of carbon dioxide and I’m really not fond of courgettes anyway. I don’t travel by plane every week as people like Kim Kardashian, Richard Branson, Rishi Sunak or Biggles with his White Fokker do and when I’m at home, which is the vast majority of the time now that I am in my twilight years, I don’t drive my car very much.

Anyway, the thing is, I’ve been on loads and loads of aeroplanes but, having been a Roman Catholic for the first few years of my life, I continue to live every day wracked with a need to offload my feelings of guilt. How many Hail Mary’s would Father Crawley have had me saying if he knew that I’d recently been with the Ryanair polluting people from Sofia to Vienna and back in the space of a fortnight. What’s the nitrous oxide to Hail Mary’s ratio? There must be a chart on a website somewhere.

Ryanair, being an Irish airline, must have a few Roman Catholics on board themselves, so the fact that their aircraft appear to be constructed from recycled parts from old Messerschmitt ME109s instead of brand new machines suggests that they might be trying to be a little more environmentally friendly. That feeling of remorse about the melting icecaps must really niggle in their undercarriages. As I’m welcomed aboard with an announcement from Ryanair’s Captain Fantastic in the cockpit informing me that he hopes I’ll enjoy the next three hours confined to a space only five millimetres bigger than the dimensions of my body in every direction, which is a much greater penance than anything that Father Crawley ever handed out as I left the confessional, I smile in appreciation of the fact that the more people they ram into an aircraft, the fewer flights there needs to be.

Anyway, the next thing is, out of all these flights that I’ve been booked up on, I’ve only ever missed one of them. I can imagine that going away on your holidays and missing your flight might bring on a cluster of negative emotions. But whenever I’ve been travelling to meet the needs of, and at the expense of, my employer, experience has told me that if I wasn’t in my allocated seat as the wheels left the ground I’d not only a be a bit hacked off about it but also prone to being verbally abused by the employer’s earthly representative. I can confirm that there’s absolutely no fun in sitting in an airport departure lounge with a redundant boarding pass and thinking about the red hot chicken and vegetables in a little foil dish that I should have been tucking into as I prepare myself for receiving a torrent of expletives from an irate personnel officer at the other end of a phone line.

I was nineteen years old at the time of me missing a plane this one and only time. I’m more than three times that age now and, although there have been three or four minor scrapes with tardiness there has never been a repetition. The minor scrapes, I would add, were always due to circumstances that were never ever my fault apart from, that is, the occasion on which I set the bedside alarm clock for the wrong time, and when I took the wrong turning off the road to the airport, or when I dithered about a bit too long over what kind of massive Toblerone bar to buy in the duty free shop or when customs officials caught me trying to smuggle more than the normal allowance of massive Toblerone bars by concealing them in an intimate place.

As a nervous teenager I was working as a Navigating Officer Cadet for a company called Scottish Ship Management. They won’t mind me mentioning their name because, as a consequence of shifts in global economics, they no longer exist. Hard times in the world of merchant shipping and the caution required in financial terms to keep their fleet of rusty tramp ships afloat meant that corners were cut so the rust grew rustier, the cargoes became scarcer and the destinations became more obscure and/or dangerous. Employees of other shipping companies tagged us with the epithet ‘Glasgow Greeks’. I hope that the good people of both Glasgow and the southern tip of the Balkan peninsula will forgive me for repeating this bit of political incorrectness but anyone who has any experience of Glaswegian seafarers or Greek cargo ships will know exactly what they meant. In actual fact we seagoing employees of the company became quite proud of the nickname in a peculiar sort of way, especially when we heard it mentioned by port authority workers, bar girls and police officers in places as far apart as Jakarta, Port Said, Quebec and Greenock.

I was flying out to begin the third trip of my illustrious career as a salty sea dog so, although still an apprentice, I was feeling fairly confident about the things that I was likely to encounter in the coming days, weeks and months.

‘You’ll be joining your next ship in Newcastle,’ I heard the personnel officer say down the phone, ‘So you’ll need to get yourself off to the Consulate in Manchester to get a visa stamped in your passport before you go, otherwise they won’t let you in.’ His name was Jimmy, by the way. It had to be. He was in Glasgow. Apart from him, another Jimmy was the only other person in the shipping office that I ever had to speak to. He dealt with expenses claims. Sometimes people would just call him Jim to distinguish him from the first Jimmy, thus avoiding confusion. The rest of Glasgow looked on in dismay.

I struggled to get my head round the need for these documentary requirements as I was living in Leeds at the time and Newcastle wasn’t much further away from home than Manchester was. I was aware that they spoke a completely different language up there and had a few strange customs but I was surprised that I’d need to be vetted in any sort of way before crossing the River Tyne.

My grandmother was from Sunderland. For the first time in my life this had become a cause for concern. How angry would Jimmy have been if my visa application had been turned down on the grounds of a blood relative being a supporter of Newcastle’s arch rival football team? And why Manchester? As a resident of Leeds I could think of no place on earth worse than there to send me to. I’m not in any way racist but Wilson’s Great Northern Bitter, which was popular on the dark side of the Pennines in the 1970s, was something that I found quite difficult to swallow along with the way the people who lived there called a bread roll a barm cake and that being there was like being in a tropical rain forest but without the tropical bits and the forest bits.

In response to my protestations, Jimmy consoled me with the words ‘New South Wales’. They were sending me to Australia, which made much more sense. I hadn’t known that there was another Newcastle in the world but from having a pint and a chat with a bloke called Denis in my local pub who had also worked on ships many years earlier and whose great grandfather had been a marsupial, I learnt that the Newcastle that I was to be heading for was famous for its coal production. I lost contact with Denis not long after he had one trip to the pub too many and he lost contact with reality but I have other sources of information nowadays from which I have just today read that Aussie Newcastle still has the largest coal exporting harbour in the world. So when we use the idiom ‘carrying coals to Newcastle’ we should really check up on which Newcastle we’re talking about; the Geordie one or the Bruce and Sheila one.

At this point I’ve stopped writing for a while to consider how big Australian Newcastle’s carbon footprint must be. They’re going to need to recycle an awful lot of empty beer cans to compensate for it.

The following day I travelled by train to Manchester to get my Australian visa. The day after that I travelled to by train to Glasgow (which ironically stopped at English Newcastle en route) to claim back from Jim (not Jimmy) the expenses I incurred on my trip to Manchester to get my Australian visa.  He also gave me my tickets for the flight to antipodean Newcastle. Looking through them to make sure I was happy with the details I saw that there were three flights; one from Leeds to London’s Heathrow airport, one from Heathrow to Sydney’s big international airport and another from Sydney’s little bushwhacker airport to Newcastle.

However, and I told Jim this in no uncertain terms, I wasn’t happy with the details. My flight from Leeds was going to land at Heathrow’s Terminal One less than an hour before the flight to Sydney would be taking off from Heathrow’s Terminal Three. First of all, I had to get him to explain to me the concept of airports having more than one terminal building; this only a day after my mind had been blown away by the discovery that Manchester had two city centre railway stations. Secondly I needed him to explain to me how I would get off one plane, negotiate my way to another building and get onto another plane within the space of fifty-five minutes. He told me that I would run. Finally, I asked him what I should do if I missed the plane to Sydney. He told me that I wouldn’t. On the return train to Leeds I sat and worried and wished I’d spoken to Jimmy, who was Jim’s senior, about the big challenge that lay ahead of me.

The next day I was free to lay in bed until late for the last time in a long time, pack into my bag everything that meant anything to me (mainly a couple of dozen Rolling Stones cassette tapes as my source of entertainment as I crossed vast oceans and my Leeds United scarf in case it got cold in the Tropics) and go for a pint with Denis who told me that if I missed my plane at Heathrow I should just go for a pint until the next plane was due.

The day after that was the day on which the action really started. I didn’t trust the Leeds buses to get me, the Rolling Stones and Leeds United to the airport on time so, with the begrudged consent of Jim, I went by taxi. The driver dropped me off precisely at the time I had planned to be outside Terminal One at Leeds/Bradford International Airport. I was confident that it was Terminal One because, forty-five years later, Terminals Two, Three, Four, etc. still haven’t been thought about, let alone been built. Smiling but feeling a little apprehensive I dragged the cassettes and football scarf inside the building, checked the departures board and then evacuated my bowels on the spot into my lucky travel underpants when I saw the words ‘delayed one hour’ written in bright lights next to the details of my flight.

Link to part two...

https://www.abctales.com/story/turlough/miss-australia-1978-%E2%80%93-part-two-four

Image:

Every image I use is from a photograph I have taken myself. 

On this occasion – My visa issued at the Australian Consulate in Manchester on 16^th July 1978.