Food for Thought

[From a long-dormant series of travel sketches.]

En route to South Africa, our flight with BA was suddenly outsourced to Cathay Pacific. It wasn’t the worst flight I’ve ever experienced (hi, Ryanair!), but it had its peculiarities.

Drinking a Dom Pedro in Knysna

At the time I was waiting for the results of a coeliac test to come back and avoiding gluten, while my wife was sticking to a vegetarian diet. (I think it was a turf ‘n’ surf in Australia that finally threw us both off the vegetarian wagon, though we’ve ridden it from time to time sinceI.) It appears that gluten-free and vegetarian mean something different in Hong Kong. My gluten-free meal included a bread roll clearly identical to my wife’s, as well as a packet of gluten-rich crackers. However, I had flat water (boring!) instead of orange juice, fish and vegetables, and a fruit pie thing that was certainly not gluten-free. My wife had miscellaneous vegetables and no meat substitute, a roll, but no pie. There was clearly something they weren’t telling us about that fruit.

Breakfast was also interesting. At first, we were served the same as everyone else: eggs, cheese, ham, salad, a roll and yoghurt. After a while, though, someone must have found our orders. They turned up with my gluten-free provender and insisted on taking away the meal I’d already half eaten. Now I had rice and vegetables, and they replaced my already gluten-free yoghurt with orange juice, perhaps the one I wasn’t allowed for the previous meal. The roll, unfortunately, really was gluten-free: unfortunate, because if there was one thing that irked me about my period of eating totally gluten-free food*, it was the bread, which always had the flavour of cardboard – or what I imagine cardboard to taste like – and the moistness of a sirocco. However, my wife decided she didn’t want anything else, so I did get her (definitely gluten-free) yoghurt.

Food apart, the flight was mostly OK: the cabin crew seemed to have an average age of 14 but were very friendly, very giggly. One was chatted up in the middle of the night by a Scot in the opposite aisle seat, who then returned to conversation with his neighbour in the window seat, as he worked his way through glasses of wine (two at a time) and then his bottle of wine from the duty-free. In the end, we politely asked him to reduce the volume: he grumbled at me a bit, but subsided into sleep soon after.

The stopover at Windhoek was astounding. The descent was over many miles of scrub, and when we down, there was still nothing but scrub either side of us until we pulled before the terminal building. We were next to a 777 and a Cessna, the smallest number of aircraft I’ve ever seen at an international airport, and some of the insects were as large as the Cessna. I hope none of them took off at the same time.

No doubt we had a drink and maybe a snack, but what I remember most is treating myself to a leather safari-type hat: a ridiculous affectation, especially for someone who still sometimes pretended to be vegetarian**, but I was probably influenced by a friend who lives somewhere in the East but is Texan by nature, and always seems to look as if he’s about to lasso a longhorn.

*Apparently, I didn’t have coeliac disease, and I don’t display the more spectacular symptoms of gluten intolerance, so if I happen to visit you, feel free to offer me sandwiches and biscuits.

**A tip of the hat here to a former relative-in-law who despised me and my previous wife for being vegetarian, though she did buy us a sort of beginner’s guide to vegetarianism one Christmas that took the interesting position of including recipes for chicken and fish. I don’t know if it was meant as a way of leading us back towards carnivorism, or it was a subtle way of insulting us by assuming we didn’t know anything about vegetarian food, or that she thought that fish and chicken were vegetables, or that it simply meant that she hadn’t actually looked inside the book. (Actually, I do remember a Christmas – not necessarily the same one – where we were tempted less by nut loaf than by a rather interesting recipe for prawns in a vodka sauce, and declared prawns to be an honorary vegetable.)

My former relative’s finest hour, however, was probably when she ranted about how stupid vegetarians were if they wore leather shoes. Though at least she never pointed out that Hitler was a vegetarian, a common theme among people who somehow find vegetarians offensive.

David Harley

British Library: Sound and Vision

Some years ago, I was contacted on behalf of the British Library to ask if I’d be willing to contribute some or all of my recorded songs to the Sound & Vision collection. I was, of course, happy to do this, and forwarded sound files as albums were released, until I stopped getting a response as the files were offered for transfer. Eventually I realized that this must have been because of the serious ransomware attack carried out against the Library in 2023.

Seeing a reference to the Sound & Vision catalogue today, I took the opportunity to see whether any of my work had become available again to BL reader’s pass holders. Well, a couple of my books apparently are in the Interim Catalogue, though I didn’t have the patience to check through all the Harley-related references for work specific to me rather than all the various David Harleys et al listed there. (It’s extraordinary how many of us there are…) But it seems that the Sounds catalogue is not yet available, though it may be restored sometime this year.

To be honest, I probably won’t get to hear when and if my music does become available again. I don’t have a Reader’s Pass because they only allow access to archived material to visitors in person, and London and Yorkshire a both a long trip from where I live. So if you really want to see what music of mine is still around, for the moment your best bet is still Bandcamp. Though given the present state of the world, who knows how long that will still apply?

David Harley

An Ideal Candidate

“The ideal candidate doesn’t have a 9 to 5 mentality.”

I have an idea I may have stolen that line from the very talented artist/illustrator/author Andrea Benko – ah, apparently I did. (As well as plundering Oscar Wilde’s dramatic oeuvre for the title of this article.) However, I really did have a departmental manager in A Certain IT Unit – at a medical research charity, if it matters – who dropped a very similar remark into the conversation when he took me to the pub for an informal getting-to-know-you chat.

“I can’t say this, but I’d be very disappointed if my staff always left the office at 5pm sharp.”

Fast forward a decade and a half. I was in a hotel in Bratislava. I was on one of those conference mini-breaks where you spend three days in the US, one at home, three more in the Far East, then two more somewhere in Europe. Of course, I’m not even trying to calculate the additional days spent travelling. But this time I’d left home in the early hours to travel halfway across England to get to Heathrow, waited around there for several hours, then taken not one but two flights to get to Bratislava because there wasn’t a direct flight. So I was ready for an early night. I don’t speak Slovak (or even Czech), so local TV was probably not going to keep me awake.

Unfortunately, I hadn’t yet turned my work phone off – in fact, I rarely did in those days.

DDDDRRRRNNNNGGGG!!!!!!!

It was a PR droid-in-charge (of something or other, but not me…) in the US, wanting me to talk to a high-profile journalist/influencer about some current security brouhaha. And he, fresh as a McFlurry on a bright morning in San Diego, couldn’t believe that an ageing security maven a million time zones away was in bed, rather than jumping at the opportunity to talk security to a professional sceptic who was always going to adapt anything I said to him to fit his preconceptions*.

“But it’s only 9pm over there!”

I should have told him to go forth and multiply (after sharing a couple of home truths about whose manager he wasn’t), but I’ve always been too polite for my own good, and I did do the interview. And I was quoted in such a way as to fit the journalist’s preconceptions…

By the time I actually retired, that cellphone had gone to the great Cellphone Warehouse in the sky, but one of the first habits I broke myself of was leaving my cellphone on overnight. If you need to talk to me urgently, use my landline. If you don’t know my landline number, it’s not ex-directory, but you probably have no reason to speak to me urgently anyway.

*I’m not going to name the journalist, who is, after all, a very competent writer with a genuine understanding of security issues. All I can say is, “he’s not the Messiah, but he’s far from the naughtiest boy in the media.”

David Harley