Somebody Mentions Jordan

The airport bookstore has always had a strange coming-of-age sort of significance for me. Maybe it has something to do with nifty hand baggage. Or because there always seems to be a lot of pinstripes and brogues around. It makes you want to feel very grown-up and make your features align into what you hope is the unreadable steel mask you see in movies where tuxedo-clad cardplayers squint around saying ‘I see your 50, and I raise you 2000’.

This is why I always seem to end up buying magazines like The Economist at airports. It makes me want to be a better man, to quote another well-flogged line from the movies. I’ll spend four or five hours in-flight relentlessly plodding through the 7.5 point type devouring erudite prose about equity margins in Yokohama.

Every Economist has one article which is more or less like the ‘middle’ in newspaper editorials. The odd article of general human interest. About gay monkeys in Uganda. Or how embroidery is really catching on among Miami millionaires. Thaaaaaank you Mr Editor. Two hours later, after I’ve read through how multinationals will fare with globalization in Basra, about how suphur is gaining ground as a commodity and the historical aspect of Japan-China trade, my patience wears thin. The Economist back in the baggage, I reward myself watching The Benny Hill show on the little screen in front of me.

All that information is now sloshing in my head. I find myself chewing on it sometimes, trying to make sense of it. I fantasise sitting across the table from a big-shot businessman like Ratan Tata saying things like “…Bush’s Treasury Department, for example, has so far refused to label China a currency manipulator even though both congressional and public sentiment currently favour doing so. It’s bloody absurd! …” and take a bite out of a bran bagel with a sip of black coffee (hold the sugar, please).

While I haven’t got the inclination towards the world of finance I’ve been blessed with an intellect that can break information down into bite-sized chunks that makes for easier processing. I could read Nietzsche and give you the gist of his existential beliefs. Which is, ‘Everybody hates you. You hate everybody.’ in case you wanted to know. So I twist and turn the facts in my mind until it becomes little-bitty bits of floating trivia, quotes, comments and wry observations, just waiting to germinate and bear fruit.

“… you seen Rocky Balboa?”

“… how could I resist? oh…urm…talking of Italians, did you hear about Prodi?”

“What, there's a sale?”

"Romano Prodi, the head of the coalition government in Italy"

"Oh yeah...of course..."

"He's there to stay I think"

"... especially since the approval of the 2007 budget and the better than expected revenue growth have improved Prodi's chances of staying in office until the end of 2008 and beyond, possibly until the end of his five-year parliamentary term."

There’s an ad for The Economist released last year in the UK. The headline says: “Somebody mentions Jordan, you think of a country with a 3.3% growth rate." This is amusing to a Briton, where the busty supermodel who shares a name with the Middle Eastern country is rarely out of the news. Thing is, I’m not even British but if somebody mentioned Jordan, the first thing I’d think of is a busty British supermodel and not a Middle-Eastern country with a 3.3% growth rate.

So it’s Hello! magazine for me, then.