When I have a stranger for a seat companion on an airplane, I generally do not open my mouth for the entire flight unless I see a wing falling off the aircraft, and I additionally come prepared with reading material in a language different from whatever I hear the other person speaking to the flight attendants. That’s just the way I am, because as you all know I find myself of little interest and make almost no posts.
This person wasn’t even supposed to be my seat companion, but I was given my seat at the last minute, and when I arrived on the aircraft, people had already redistributed themselves around the plane in the hope than no more people were boarding. And I found myself suddenly splitting up a couple who thought they had cleverly claimed 3 seats. They were briefly speechless about their bad luck, but then the husband asked if I wouldn’t mind moving to where his seat actually was, an aisle seat a couple of rows up. I instantly agreed and therefore moved next to a weird little man who was equally dismayed to suddenly have “his” empty seat occupied.
So, there I was, and there was nothing he could do about it. Or was there? As the cabin crew went up and down the aisles doing the usual things they do, he intercepted one of them and asked him “Excuse me, but could you please have the purser come and see me when he has a moment after takeoff? It isn’t at all urgent, but I would really appreciate it.”
Grrrrrr, I thought. Any normal person will speak to the flight attendant if there is something that needs to be done. If he was asking for the purser, it was probably to say something like “I can’t stand sitting next to this stinky sweaty man who isn’t even sitting in his proper seat! Please do something about it.”
We were still 15 minutes from takeoff, but the purser appeared as if summoned with a magic wand (which just goes to prove that all of that walking up and down the aisles stuff is bullshit).
Purser: “Monsieur, what can I do for you?”
Strange little man: “Oh, I must tell you that I am working for you at the moment. I was in Business Class on the outgoing flight. I don’t know if messages were not properly transmitted, but here I am in economy, and I was wondering if I could be moved up front.”
Damn him to hell. He could have just said, “I can’t stand sitting next to this stinky sweaty man. Get me out of here!” But he had also broken the very clearly written rules of “working for you”. I am one of those people as well, and I know that rule #1 is “never ever ask for special favors.” Jeez, I have seen people asking the same thing all the time, and I despise them for it. Fuck, you are getting a free or almost free ticket, don’t push it! And yet some such people will always try.
The purser said with grace and dignity that unfortunately, the front of the plane was completely full, so there could be no upgrading. I hadn’t even been the last person to board, and there were precious few empty seats in economy class.
And so the little man began to speak to me against my will. He repeated that Air France had sort of hired him, but it quickly became clear that it was indirectly, and that he was not at all an Air France employee. He was a photographer sent to Vietnam and Cambodia to take photos for their upcoming advertising campaign. (He had boarded the flight in Hanoi.) Okay, I was ready to forgive him for asking for an upgrade, and I even felt that it was inelegant of Air France to send him on assignment in precarious conditions of comfort.
On top of that, he said, “I’m 84 years old.” That really floored me, because he looked more like he was 64 years old.
The plane finally took off, and dinner arrived relatively rapidly. That’s sort of normal, as it was close to midnight. Anyway, the subject of this thread is “exceptional encounters at dinner” so here is the dinner menu:
Thai papaya salad with prawns, slightly spiced (bullshit!)
Grilled Siam perch with compote of sun-dried tomatoes, rice and spinach
Camembert
Sliced papaya and dragon fruit salad
Pecan pie
At least that’s what I had. The other hot dish possibility was
chicken fricassee with mustard seed, linguini and buttered peas and carrots.Every now and then, there has been a dip in quality, but Air France food remains generally edible.
Anyway, I learned much more about my seat companion. He had been commissioned by Air France to take photos for their next advertising campaign, and this particular trip had entailed taking photos of Halong Bay and also the Cambodian temples of the Angkor Wat complex. He felt that out of about 500 photos, he had succeeded in taking a truly exceptional photo at Halong, with a remarkable combination of clouds and sunset, and his only worry was successfully removing a mobile phone antenna on top of one of the cliffs. “But I am a Photoshop master,” he added. You don’t come across many 84 year old people who can claim such things. He also felt that he held the Cambodian photo in one of his shots of Ta Phrom, the temple ruins buried under vegetation. “But I know that it will not be truly original, because everybody has already photographed every scrap of it from every angle.” He felt that his selling point would be that it was a cloudy day, which allowed the colors to be richly saturated rather than washed out by excessive sunlight.
He told me that he had moved to Bergerac in Dordogne about 20 years earlier, but that he had lived in Saint Germain des Prés in Paris for forty years. “It really was a village then, and everybody knew everybody. For more than 10 years, I lived in a hotel as many of us did back then. My next door neighbor was Juliette Greco.” And of course he talked about “the Flore” and mentioned that Sartre often bought him drinks. He was 20 years younger than Sartre, so it was only normal for the famous guy to pay.
Although he quickly said that he was a committed socialist, he was a special counselor to President Chirac for the first 7 years, but he said it was a thankless task as governments never really want to accept any advice that is given. We passed in review all of the current political leaders, all of whom he seems to know personally, and he regrets that Martine Aubry, head of the Socialist Party, is a lush.
It was also mentioned in passing that he was president of the cinema technicians union for about 20 years, before going to live in Brazil for 4 years. His own origins are Jewish Greek, he told me, even though he is a committed atheist.
He said that if the plane crashed, he would be the last one off, because he was not leaving without his camera. I asked why he didn’t send his files over the internet ahead of time. “I can’t send files from countries like that,” he explained. “My camera has 21 million pixels.”
Yes, it was an interesting encounter. We shook hands and told each other that we would see each other around one of these days. We did not exchange names.
