The wallpaper on my iPad is of the new
Bentley V8 superb looking vehicle: that really is a lottery win dream. Here is
that photo, courtesy of those awfully nice Bentley people themselves!
Anyway, as I was returning to my room at
the hotel, I saw a massive Bentley outside of the back entrance. There were a
few people milling around, including the driver, who was wearing a baseball
cap!
A tiny man, all dressed in white but with a
significantly bald head, walked slowly towards the car with his hands behind
his back and his head semi bowed down. The driver opened the back door for the
man who almost vanished inside that cavernous vehicle as he climbed inside.
Behind this man was a woman of the same
height, wearing a sari: she was following the man fairly closely and as he
climbed into the car she stopped. She was waiting for the man to move over to
let her in: he didn’t. Dignity maintained, as her halt was fleeting, she
quickly changed her direction and went round the back of the car and the driver
opened the rear door on the other side of the car to let her in.
Man and woman were now ensconced and the
driver went round the car again, to get into the driving seat.
A young man and woman were now left on the
pavement and clearly they were confused as the young woman made a move as if to
open the driver’s door but she also halted fleetingly before she changed
direction and the couple started to walk away.
At this point I heard myself say, what a
shitty little man, a shitty little man; and left the scene to return to my
room.
Lovely car, though!
As I was in the lift a memory came flooding
back of a situation that arose in Almaty back in 1998/99. We had arrived there
in August 1998 and after a whole term of living in a dormitory, we were given
some hope of moving out into the community and living in our own flats or
houses.
We were asked to describe our hopes and
aspirations for the housing we were asking for and one of our team wrote the
most inappropriate list of demands one could ever imagine. We were in post Soviet
Kazakhstan where the majority of the population didn’t have two ha’pennies to
rub together; flats and houses were often dangerously badly built; as many as three
and even four generations of families shared one flat; and the furniture was
Soviet utility style and standard.
Apart
from tiger skin rugs, Italianate furniture and bath fittings, this colleague,
also a small man, asked for a king sized bed with some outrageous bedding and a
duck down duvet! This latter request led me to make a drawing of the impact of
this request having been granted.DW
