Waiting to take off to Turkey when....

Why don't you just tell the story? I hear the 'creative' writing tutors nag, but I am troubled by thoughts when telling a story

Such as...the future does not exist yet.... but, hold on,  in narrative fiction it does. For imprisoned as we are in the ineluctable (inescapable ) present we have no access to the future

But in fiction, the ontological (reality) boundary is redrawn, blurred  or erased. The mind magically becomes  capable of temporal tourism

I mean, think of the already thereness in the reel of a film, or a book. I think that my hands, my mouth as imprisoned in this century but my mind is not it can range over all time. If i write about Turkey, some will read it before others will and will therefore know the future before others. So what?

But narrative does it work by crossing the boundary between actual and potential  futures to produce a hermeneutic (interpretive or explanatory) circle between narrative and time.

The Future in narrative fiction becomes a model of teleological retrospect (a doctrine explaining phenomena by their ends or purposes )  which narrative encodes.

Yet if you were sitting opposite me now I would be making it up as I proceed, The oral delivered as a story is open i.e.  I have the choice of making it up, on the hoof, as it were.

So, go on,  tell, 'write' that story about Turkey.

We are parked at Gatwick on the runway waiting for take off. How can they get so many people on a plane? The leg room is minimal, just legal. Our postures are as if in yogic extremis as if in embryo. They must comply with those legal requirements, mustn't they?

"What is that pummeling?"

The passenger behind seem to be digging into our seats. That can't be their foreheads, can it?

"I don't know, maybe they think they are kangaroos."

"Keep your voice down" says the mother of my children.

So we are going to have 4 hours of this because I have booked a package holiday to Turkey.

More people boarding. God they are fat!  This plane will never be able to lift off. If you believe Sartre's dictum that 'Hell is Other People' then a package tour will confirm it.

My children who are seated in front are just loving it all. The 'fatties' keep boarding. In 13 years, what a contribution Blair and Brown made to the nation's health. I hope this plane has a lot of thrust power.

I take a deep breath, Turkey, the nearest I have ever been to the East is a  jaunt in Athens, where I sensed a cultural difference watching people argue and gesticulate in coffee bars and I deemed I was witnessing, Sophistry writ large; Socratic dialogues at there most earnest. 

Bloody hell, I recall it now. I nearly died in Athens. It was in my neo-hippy stage, me sailing round the Greek islands, till I end up in a flea pit hotel in down town Athens. It is baking that night and I leave my window open on the fifth floor.

Then I stir, what is that?  What!

There is a man at the end of my bed, standing there. What!

My God! I think of keeping my eyes closed and praying he will go. He is heading towards the window. Go, go go,. Please go.

Then suddenly a wave of anger overcomes me. I am consumed by fury. Hold on, I am fucking broke. Has he taken my last Euros?

No, fuck this. I leap out of the bed. And he is just outside the window about to descend the fire escape.

"You wait there, get back in to this fucking room," I scream at him..

He is bearded and sweating profusely.

"Have you taken my money, have your taken my fucking money?  Have you, have you?

You fucking stand there and wait."

 I rush across and check my wallet, its all there, my few pitiful Euros.

"Drugs" he says, "...drugs...look for drugs."  The sweat is cascading out of him.

For an instant I am insulted that he has climbed up the five flights of the fire escape, five fucking flights and has probably had a 'dekko' or 'gander' as Pinter would have it, through all the bedroom windows and then he looks through my window and thinks,

'Ah, he...he look like druggy.'

"Go on, fuck off, go on. Get out."

 I watch him climb out of the window. He stands on the fire escape and looks pitifully at me. 

"Go on, fuck off."

I watch him descend, and then I close the window. I get back into bed. I do not alert the Hotel staff or call the Police. There are not many things I like about myself but I do like that aspect.

Back in London they exclaim, 'Jesus, you were lucky there. He could have had a knife.'

So that was my experience of the 'Orient' and now I am going en famille. How to prepare?.

I read Edwards Said on Orientalism,that's what I do. The gist of it, in a filleted version, is this:

In a polemic against ‘Orientallsm’ Edward Said identified persistent tropes in which the West have visualised Eastern and Arab cultures. The Orient functions as a theatre, he argues, a stage on which the performance is repeated, to be seen from a privileged standpoint of Western eyes.

For Said, the Orient is then textualised, its existential predicaments are coherently woven as a body of signs susceptible of virtuoso reading.

It is through this process the 'The Orient' has been occulted by these authors, and supposedly brought lovingly to light. For the Orient has been salvaged in the work of the saintly scholar. Writers! Don't you just love them?

 It is in such deployments, that they (authors) confer on the ‘other’ (the Oriental) discreet identity, while also providing the knowing observer (Westerners) with a stand point which to be seen and yet not be seen, a panoptic view of the Oriental which we can read in our leisure without interruption.

The author’s voice is seen as a tone or an embellishment of the facts.

Hope I haven't done that with the Greek tale. Because that really did happen.  So how will I 'write' (the arrogance in that word makes me cringe) about Turkey?

There is a scream in front of us, as a fat child bellows out and the parent barks, 'Baily, shut it"

The child screams louder, "Baily will you shut it!"

"What's that?"

"What? Oh fuck."

Let me come clean here. Since booking this package to Turkey I have indulged myself in every possible disaster scenario. And top of the list is, we will be blown out of the skies by terrorists.

"I have never seen that before, have you?"

We look at the phalanx of burly police officers boarding the plane.

"No" says my far less alarmist wife.

"What's going on?"

Now we watch the stewardess walk purposefully down the aisle and address an Asian looking girl. All heads swivel to look.

I remembered seeing her at the boarding area. They were hard not to notice, four of them, three men, in their early 20s with jewelled earrings and this attractive girl. I deemed them to be a rock group.

Some of the police have gone up to talk to the pilot and are now returning with forced smiles  to the passengers as the edge down the aisle.

"I have never seen this before."

"Stop saying that will you?"

I have this fantasy of flinging myself in front of the bombers.

"The stewardesses look quite concerned."

"Yes, they do. Why don't you go up and ask them what is going on."

I am out of my seat like a greyhound out of its trap and

and when I get to the boarding entrance, to my left, I can see the burly, armed policeman questioning this slip of a girl.

"Can I ask you what is going on, please. Could you tell me the reason for this delay?"

The stewardess' face seems ingrained with anxiety. Don't they train them to reflect calm?

"I don't know what is going on....could you return to your seat now...please, Sir."

"What did she say?"

"She doesn't know."

Now I watch the Asian girl returning to her seat.

'Oh no.'

I can just see the headlines '...bumbling Airport Police let bomb suspect go.'

Why did I ever book this holiday, how could I do this to my children, the mother of my children.

She leans across, 'Bosco, you seem very agitated."

"Who me?"

"Yes, you. Now please calm down."

'Good evening ladies and gentlemen and boys and girls. Apologise for the short delay but we will soon be on our way. Now I would ask you to please keep your seat belts fastened as we may experience a little turbulence on the way....but shouldn't be...."

Oh no, on top of everything turbulence, this is truly hell.

"Turbulence Dad" pipes up my youngest, "...that should be fun." Glad she is so hardy but we are not in the bloody fairground, it is not a ride on the  bloody 'big dipper' is it?

 This is going to be a loooonnng flight.