9.1.12

What a (Little) Gentleman!


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.

As a matter of interest, I last saw this man in 2003 when he left our project and I heard nothing about him until late last year, 2011, when I saw him on one of the social networking sites and he had written this astonishing plea: la la la, I am looking for work but have been unemployed for two and a half years … Well, this man is the best part of 80 years old now so fair play to him that he might be capable of working. However, trying to generate sympathy as a reason for giving someone a job is not the best of strategies in my book. 




DW