Journey to Saigon

Appears in

Published 1994

About

Finally, the flight was called and in the suffocating heat, after a jerky bus ride when we were threatened with being wiped out by jets landing every two or three seconds, we shuffled on to the Cathay Pacific 747 -or whatever it was. And to make matters worse it was a ‘No Smoking’ flight.

None of us could decide how long the flight was going to be. David was still operating on Devon time. No one could be certain if there was now eight or nine hours’ time difference from the UK. At any rate it promised to be at least two hours so I decided to pass the journey reading Conrad – something I had been trying to do for the last four weeks but for some reason or another had failed to get round to it. So as a short cut I thought I would read Gavin Young’s Odyssey to find out who Conrad really was. I also had Graham Greene and Somerset Maugham to read (so I could make witty asides in my pieces to camera). But oh dear! Conrad’s heavy, this whole effort was now getting out of hand. David had the idea that Heart of Darkness or Lord Jim would be some kind of coathanger on which to hang our trip. He was for ever saying, ‘I bet Conrad would have seen that’, ‘I bet Conrad was there’. But he wasn’t reading his books either.