[BITList] Frank Sinatra - Strangers on my flight

[HUGH]

John,

Poor Frank - roped in posthumously to plug another man's views.  For myself, I have often flown in the company of total strangers, some of them pretty suspect, and one or two decidedly foreign looking, but I decided at an early stage to leave Sinatra out of it.  An elderly Sikh bound for Glasgow from Washington Dulles embarrassed his wife by over emphasising his bag of duty free bottles through forgetting it and having to leave the queue at the point of entering the plane.  Then he insisted on carrying it on his knee despite his wife's and the stewardess's instructions.  Eventually it was stashed in the overhead, but as soon as the stewardess was out of sight he retrieved it.  His wife sat in affronted silence all the way home, refusing all offers of food, drink and conversation from him and others.  And there was the wee Muslim sitting beside me on the Glasgow/London flight, visibly sweating and agitated.  This was 2 weeks after 11/9-9/11.  Ten minutes into the flight he put down his wee book, sighed, and said to me, "I hate bloody flying.  I hate it." He was bound for an ecumenical event in London with, it appeared, half the other passengers, none of them remotely Muslim-looking. "Any time you're in Glasgow," he told me," Come into the mosque for a cup of tea."  He was from Bombay, and we had a nice chat about the city.

Hugh.
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