POSTING #80

A Miscellany of Stories---from Far and Wide

It has been a strange (and very hot) week with no discernable pattern---it has been a little bit of this, with a dash of that.

This posting reflects that lack of a single theme with several unrelated stories, stories that come from Yorkshire, Novosibirsk and Amman.

Now how's that for 'far and wide'?

I hope you enjoy them!

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This week as I was driving along the Welland Canal on a road with a posted speed of 50 kph, a car coming toward me blinked its lights. I travel that road often and know that it is a favourite place for Niagara Region's finest to hang out. Sure enough, just around the next curve was a policeman with a radar gun.

Having learned to set the cruise control at a safe speed, I was OK but the warning blink reminded me of Yorkshire in the early 1960s.

We bought a car and immediately joined the Automobile Association (AA), a venerable organization that provided roadside assistance, as well as maps and authoritative guides to hotels, inns and restaurants.

As part of our membership package, we received a good-sized, yellow and  black metal AA badge to attach to the grill of the car.

In that pre-cell phone era, the AA had a fleet of uniformed employees who cruised the roads on motorcycles with sidecars, ready to help members who were in trouble.

One of the first things I noticed, after affixing the plaque to the grill, was that when we met an AA motorcycle employee, he saluted us.

A nice, crisp salute.

I must say that it felt good to be saluted. It seemed to say, 'Don't worry about car problems, we are here to help'.

It's silly, but it also felt good to be recognized as someone of importance---similar I suppose to the rush that newly-minted army officers must feel when they receive their first salutes. 

When I told an English friend about the AA greetings, he interrupted and asked whether I knew the background to the salutes.

 I didn't.

He explained that in the early days of British motoring, the police started to position officers with stop watches behind trees and posts to catch speeders.

The AA decided to warn its members of these speed traps by having their motorcycle employees salute when there was a policeman ahead. A salute meant a speed trap.

The police took the AA to court for interfering with the course of justice, or some such offense. And the court agreed with the police, that warning motorists was illegal ---it just wasn't cricket.

The AA debated what to do.  Assisted I suspect by some clever lawyer-members they decided on a response.

In future, the AA motorcycle staff would salute all members, EXCEPT when there was a speed trap ahead.

No salute, meant a trap.

The beauty of it was that the police could not charge a motorcycle employee for NOT doing something.

The clever British!

A postscript.

As our time in England came to a close,  the AA decided that the increasing volumes of traffic made it dangerous for their motorcycle staff to watch for the AA badge and then lift a hand off the handlebars to salute.

The salutes stopped and we were on our own, at least as far as speed traps were concerned.

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Talking about police reminds me of a 1996 run-in with a traffic officer in Novosibirsk, the third largest city in Russia (after Moscow and St. Petersburg) and the largest city in Siberia.

My office manager/interpreter, Yuri (not his real name), and I were in Siberia checking on an office that our hosts---the Russian Federal Employment Service---wanted  our Canadian consultants to overhaul and change into a model employment office.

As we were walking to a meeting, we came to  a busy and wide boulevard with 6 lanes of traffic. There was a pedestrian underpass nearly a block away but being a little late we decided to jaywalk across the boulevard, dodging speeding Ladas and the larger Volgas and Zims.

It was an exhilarating bit of broken field running, crossing all those lanes of traffic.

We were feeling good as  we arrived safely at the other side---until we saw a policeman waiting to talk to us.

My first thought was, 'Oh-oh what have we done now' The second thought was, ' Well, they can't send us to Siberia, we are already here'.

And then I thought, 'They could just leave us here.'

The policeman, a somewhat over-weight man in his 50s, wanted to know who we were and what we thought we were doing. Yuri explained and then the policeman launched into a stern lecture aimed primarily at Yuri---I suppose he felt that as a Westerner I couldn't be expected to know any better.  

After what seemed like a severe dressing-down, the policeman's demeanour relaxed a bit, and he motioned for us to move on.

Relieved that we weren't going to get a fine or worse, I asked, " What did he say?".

Yuri replied, "He kept repeating that what we had done was very dangerous and that we should have used the pedestrian underpass.

"And then at the end, he said that on our way back we should use the underpass because he was feeling tired and his back hurt. He didn't want to have to lug our bodies off the road."

And who said Russians don't have a sense of humour?

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There were a number of references in the media this week to the clothing worn by some Muslim women. There is a debate in Turkey and Quebec about the wearing of the hijab, a head scarf, and in France and Syria about the wearing of the burqa (sometimes called the niqab) that veils the face, with just a slit for the wearer to see through.

It is clear from the media items that the debate is going on not just between Muslims and Westerners but also between different groups within the Muslim community---as Muslims try to agree on what the Koran means when it talks about 'modest dress' for women.

The articles reminded me of two stories from  my consulting assignments in the Kingdom of Jordan, during the period from 2001 to 2006.

One evening in Amman, a couple of Canadian colleagues and I were window shopping in Swafia, an upscale area with fancy and expensive shops selling jewellery, clothing, perfume, shoes and so on. As we passed a Victoria-Secrets-type lingerie shop, we saw three women wearing brown burqas---the women were obviously from Saudi Arabia or one of the Gulf states because although the headscarf (hijab) was fairly common among Amman women, the burqa was not.

One of the women was holding a skimpy, lacy bra across the front of her burqa. Although we couldn't hear what they were saying and couldn't see their faces, we could tell from the shaking of their shoulders that the woman were laughing and having fun imaging what effect the bra would have in the boudoir, back home.

I am sure that a video of those burqa-clad women and the bra would have been a great hit on U-tube---if it had existed at that time.

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The other story is one told by the taxi driver---I'll call him Fadi---who usually drove me from the hotel to my office. At the end of a particular week he told me that he would not be able to drive me the following week but would arrange for one of his taxi driver friends to take me.

I said that was fine.

He said he had been hired for the whole week to take a newly-wed couple from one of the Gulf states on a honeymoon tour of Jordan. Fadi was excited by the challenge of fitting into just one week all the attractions Jordan offered.

In the middle of the next week, he suddenly showed up at the hotel, looking unhappy.

"What happened, I thought you were tied up for the week with the honeymoon couple", I asked as I got into his taxi.

He shook his head and the story poured forth.

He had met the couple at the Amman airport and driven them to the hotel. He said the husband was in his early 20s and although expensively dressed seemed a little unsure of himself. The tall, slender wife was wearing a white burqa made of some fine material, probably silk, with just a slit for her eyes.

After they had checked in, Fadi took them on a driving tour of Amman.

The next morning after the couple got into the taxi, the husband, who seemed upset about something, asked Fadi to turn the rear-view mirror up toward the roof of the car. He said he didn't want Fadi looking at his wife in the mirror.

Fadi protested that he needed to see what was behind him, but the husband told him he could use the side mirrors.

Fadi reluctantly agreed and twisted the mirror upwards.

At lunch-time, Fadi stopped at a restaurant and selected a good table. The husband made a point of asking Fadi to sit at a different table.

When Fadi called at the hotel the next morning to pick up the couple, the doorman told him that they had returned to the Gulf. It appeared that  the stress of men looking at his new wife was too much for the young man.

Fadi said he understood about modesty and veils over the face. In fact, he hadn't seen his future wife's face until the two families had nearly completed their marriage negotiations (his mother had seen the girl's face and told him that she was pretty). It was only then that the young people were allowed to go into a room by themselves. Once there, the girl removed her veil.

But, in Fadi's opinion, the young husband's concern about men looking at his burqa-clad wife was excessive.

He shook his head and said that it was a shame that a young man with obvious wealth and a new wife couldn't let himself be happier.

Fadi didn't say it, but I like to think that he was concerned as well about the happiness of the wife. 

After all, Fadi had refused to insist on the customary (in the Middle East) and substantial  (US$3000 was common) 'dowry' paid by a man---in gold--- to the father of the woman he wanted to marry.

Fadi wanted his daughters to marry men who would make them happy, even if the men didn't have a lot of money. All Fadi asked was that a man who wanted to marry one of his daughters should give the daughter a small piece of gold jewellery on the wedding day.

From photos that Fadi loved to show me of his daughters with their husbands and children it seemed pretty obvious that the marriages had worked out well.

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See you on August 8th for Posting #81 with more stories from our family’s universe! If you have comments or suggestions, please leave a comment at the bottom of this posting,  or email me at johnpathunter@gmail.com.