by Maeve Binchy
It’s tough, Margaret, but you did ask me round to advise you. And the best thing I can say is: Let’s not hear a squeak out of you. And maybe the book on Europe will turn out to be a great success and you’ll go to it with your nice closed mind and there will be no danger that you might get any nasty surprises and enjoy the place.
Colour her Grey
“There has been a bit too much colour in Britain of late. They want something muted and gentle now.”
If I were Norma Major, I would make a positive virtue out of being Grey. I would make Greyness the in thing, the class-act of the decade. And I would become the high priestess of it. The Greyest of all.
The country that her husband rules over is actually dying for a bit of peaceful greyness if she only knew it. She should listen to no advisers telling her to wear bright colours and come out with bright utterances.
There has been a bit too much colour in Britain of late. They want something muted and gentle now. They want background people, and Norma could be leader of the pack.
Norma was 51 last month. Nice and quietly. Good.
There is no need for the image-makers to dredge up exciting things to feed to the press about her. Every now and then, when they think she’s getting too grey, they tell us: about the oops-oops time she once said that she was “sick of her husband bringing all the official boxes home to bed with them with a clatter and a crash which was bloody selfish of him really”.
Never has a phrase been so often quoted: it’s as if to prove that she has spark and fire so that the great electorate won’t think she is ordinary and stop voting for her husband.
But this is where they have got it so wrong. People are dying for somebody ordinary. Everyone else lives fairly dreary lives; they want leaders to be dreary too.
They are sick of flash-harry people like Norman Lamont and Fergie. They are tired of revelations about Prince Charles’s friend Camilla and Fergie’s father’s love life. Deep down they are looking for someone gracious and non-showy, someone respectable and understated.
They have lost Queen Elizabeth. First of all her family is out of control; then she has started quibbling about the taxes she did agree to pay. No: it’s Norma’s big chance.
And this is how I’d do it.
I’d surround myself with the loudest and most colourful people in the land, or indeed any land. I would engineer and manipulate some kind of public event where they would all show themselves up to be deafening and vulgar and ultimately tiresome.
It might be an event in aid of a charity or a good cause and she could assemble a team of people like Fergie and Ruby Wax and Ben Elton and Lenny Henry and Jeffrey Archer and Twink – and many, many more people, good and bad, who would have one thing in common: they would all be colourful and vocal. Then she should let them loose on the media. All together.
And because they are all such troopers, people like myself, who can’t abide a silence, and who rush to fill the vacuum – they will feel that things need to be said, and follow that awful principle that the Show Must Go On. And they’ll be so noisy and plain tiring that the people will turn to Norma as they once turned to Eva Peron.
Don’t forget Evita gave the Argentines what they didn’t have, which was a bit of glamour. Norma could give the British a rest from colour and drama; she could give them a lovely safe grey haven.
If I were Norma, I would realise that I had done everything right so far. She has perfect credentials. She had a job as a domestic science teacher in various London schools. She met her husband not in a topless bar or in an eyeball-to-eyeball conflict over a boardroom table but doing constituency work, ferrying voters to and from the polls.
She has brought up her two children quietly and normally and well out of the public eye; hardly anyone knows anything about Elizabeth and James Major which is a plus for her. She has an endearing habit of saying things that turn out to be absolutely untrue.
Like saying, in 1990, that things couldn’t be as bad as in 1989 when her husband had been Foreign Secretary. She thought things were going to quieten down a bit.
Then, when asked what his chances were of becoming Prime Minister she said: “That kind of thing doesn’t happen to people like us.”
She has laid an excellent foundation for greatness. Let her take no heed of those who want to give her public speaking lessons and assertiveness training. Instead she should be seen daily in the company of anyone whose main claim to fame is that they’re a bit of a mouth. It will be such a comfort not to have to listen to anyone else with instant attitude on everything that the people will cleave to her.
The memories of being handbagged to death will only be a bad dream; the Hillary factor will not hang over them; the relief that they might have escaped being lectured by Glenys Kinnock will be extreme. Andrew Lloyd Webber could be waiting in the wings:
Don’t cry because you’re grey Normita.
The truth is, that’s the colour they want you.
Lilac Buggy
“Aer Rianta doesn’t really mind if we take off or land on an emu as long as we use their airports”
Now it is never the fault of Aer Lingus, you must understand that as you fight for breath and hold on to passing strangers for support. Because it’s actually true. Aer Lingus only runs the airline. The bad guys are the British Airport Authority and Aer Rianta; their remit is all about airport management and duty-free shops and design and planning and duty-free shops and car parking and catering and duty-free shops and fire-fighting and rescue and duty-free shops.
So when Heathrow became off limits for those of us without the long, loping gait of the athlete, the stamina of the Alaskan husky and the spare canister of oxygen at the ready, a lot of us chose to use British provincial airports instead.
I picked Bristol because we have friends who live near it and it’s a great excuse to go and see them and it’s a dotey little airport anyway. It’s like a holiday airport in Greece 30 years ago: you get off the plane and walk a short distance into a small building while your luggage chugs along beside you on a trailer. And that’s it. No tunnels, no turning corners and saying “I don’t believe this . . .” There’s no labyrinth, no miles of terrible, menacing carpet, no series of 4,000 glossy advertisements to darken your brow. (If all these advertisers pay real money for this airport space then maybe, you fear to yourself, the journey will be twice the length next year).
So I felt a lot better, selfishly. I felt that I had found a solution to the problems posed by Heathrow’s interminable terminal. And, in Dublin, there was a nice buggy that drove you down the long journey to Pier A. And all kinds of able-bodied people travelled on this buggy, so you didn’t feel as if you’d thrown in the towel by getting into it.
So far, so good.
And then a few months ago, there was no buggy. Very disappointed indeed, I asked what had happened to it. They thought it might be off for the day. That was bad luck, I thought, and crawled off to make the journey down the miles of Pier A. I didn’t make a federal case out of it at the time because a buggy could break down or a driver could be sick.
Two weeks later there was no buggy again. They hadn’t seen one for days, people told me, so I rang Aer Rianta. It was all the work being done in the area, they said, lots of building, and it would be difficult for the buggy to navigate through all the great works that were going on to enhance Pier A. When would it eventually be enhanced, I asked? Stage One was going according to plan, I was told.
I went out to the airport last week. Stage One had gone according to plan: a gleaming duty-free shop had opened, naturally. Heavy priority. No workmen around with their bums in the air to be mown down by those travelling in buggies like they had feared before. But not a buggy to be seen.
I rang Aer Rianta again when I had recovered from the journey. It’s a bit too crowded for the buggies I was told, too many people around the place. Most of them concerned about chest pains, I said.
The spokesman went away to get a ruling. The ruling came back. There
were too many people around Pier A, they said, that was the problem. People coming both ways – departing and arriving. When there were only departing passengers, it meant they were all going in one direction and you could sort of skirt them in the buggy but now you’d be crashing into them and the place would be strewn with bodies. I am paraphrasing their answer.
I did suggest, mildly, that an airport authority might, in fact, expect people to be travelling in both directions, it being the nature of things. People arrive, people leave. They took this on board and said that soon, quite soon, a travelator would arrive, at enormous cost, to carry people the long, long way to Pier A. Could they hazard a guess as to how soon? The inside of a year, they hoped. And would the travelator go all the way or just a silly cosmetic little distance like at Heathrow? Nearly all the way, they hoped. But until then, would Pier A be buggyless?
Had I noticed the nice, new, little trolley things they had introduced, they wondered? To be strictly fair, I had. But I considered them a very poor substitute for our friend the buggy.
I asked why it was that, sometimes, when you came back from Bristol or Birmingham, you found yourself by a miracle in the Arrivals Hall and other times you had the Long March. It was a question of docking, they said, it all depended where the plane docked.
Now my advice to Aer Rianta is to get real. They are meant to be a service industry. They do all sorts of passenger surveys and claim that they read customer complaint cards. The profile of visitors surely includes the maturing traveller as well as those armies of lithe little back-packers who leap from every flying machine only dying to stretch their long limbs by doing a few laps around the circular terminal building. There must be many, like myself, who are not disabled enough for a wheelchair but not strong enough to fly from Pier B (which is normal) to Heathrow (which is not). And not able now to fly to Bristol or Stansted (which are normal), because it means going through Pier A in Dublin, which is getting less normal every week Next time I’ll try CityJet to London City Airport to measure the normality factors.
But, you see, Aer Rianta doesn’t really mind if we take off or land on an emu as long as we use their airports – and that just isn’t fair. Truly, it isn’t fair just to ignore the people who drag themselves along saying “It can’t be much further now and it’ll be over by this time tomorrow”.
This is a public limited company which is meant to be working in our interests, helping us to travel to and from our own island, and helping visitors to get in and out of the place with some kind of feeling of well-being rather than submitting them to an endurance test.
I have been studying the pictures of Dermot O’Leary (Acting Chairman) and Derek Keogh (Chief Executive) in the IPA Yearbook and Diary. From the small, postage stamp-sized images they look like men with perfectly clear and open expressions. You can’t see any sadism in their smiles.
But they cannot be reasonable men if they cancel passenger services such as buggy cars – especially when all they need to do is put bells on them to alert pedestrians, for heaven’s sake. They can’t be open and fair if they hide behind explanations about passengers travelling in both directions as if this was some sort of freaky complication – in an airport.
I advise Aer Rianta that the tumbrels could well come for them one day. Tumbrels with lovely, big, comfortable buggy wheels and seats and engines. Let them act now before it is too late.
July 16, 1994
(Aer Rianta moved with speed to restore the buggy. Indeed, they didn’t even stop to do more than give it a quick wipedown before they wheeled in onto the Pier A route, which is why it is still a pallid yellow as we go to print. However, they assure me that the minute there’s a let-up in the customer traffic they are going to paint it, and you can send me a thought of gratitude as you glide up and down in the Lilac Buggy. This is the kind of response that makes giving unasked-for advice totally worthwhile.)
The End