Six Hours in Java

Wrong time, wrong place: Clock, Salvador Dali 1945

Nairobi Airport. Again.

The plastic lions at Jomo Kenyatta International are very lazy this afternoon. I’m spending a long layover in the Java Bar and Lounge. I’ve legged up and down the departure lounge enough times to know that the Java is the only place with padded seats to sit out six hours of waiting.

There seems to be some failure of Kenyan self-belief here. When you grow your own coffee, why name your coffee bar after your competitor on another continent? Hakuna matata, as it says on a hundred t-shirts.

I find the only empty booth. It’s by the window. Perhaps the view will inspire my weekly column.

It’s nice and quiet in here. The main noise is the air-conditioning, which is blowing out hot air, happily displaying graphics of blue ice crystals and a temperature of 32 degrees Celsius.

There's not much happening on the apron, so this freelance lowers his mental visor and looks inward for inspiration. He sleeps, of course, instead. An hour passes.

When I wake, the aircon has made my head even fuller of hot air than usual. I peep through my visor at my fellow layabouts. Six hour layovers in Nairobi are the norm for inter-continental travellers. Not many of them look like East Africans to me, but I couldn’t be sure. I have a growing retinue of saw-bones, blacksmiths and head-shrinkers to keep me in the saddle nowadays. When one of them said I didn’t appear to be of Kenyan stock, I thought that was fairly obvious. It turned out he was referring not to skin, teeth or hair, but to my rump which, while perfect in form and proportion,was never going to break the world record at 100 metres.

Apart from other people's physical appearances, the main entertainment is what they are reading.

I took the lady in the straight hair and smock for an American, because she was chewing gum with her mouth open. If I knew about these things, I would say she was trying to look like Rachel out of Friends, but lacked the wherewithal of someone with the royalties off a 20 disc boxed set. (It has been suggested to me that M1's preference for Friends over football is a bit metropolitan for Marple Bridge. Surely not.)

I noted that Rachel was reading a document from GTZ the German development agency, so perhaps it’s Freunden. And I cunningly divined the linguistic persuasion of the lady opposite me reading Les hirondelles de Kaboul, even before she asked: “zer is no wee-fee?” Carry on, Hercule.

A second hour limps past.

Oh dear. The view from the bridge is ... not a lot. What will my three readers think of me? I open my book instead, and doze off. Another sixty minutes.

Get the computer out: the only way to write is to write. Think into ink.

Mrs M says I should keep a stock of Views for Thursdays like this. I could have a catalogue of cook-chilled Views on such terrible topics as the Hash House Harriers, the “Drinkers with a Running Problem” who “tried to get to heaven, but went the other way.”

Anything but the bloody hash. Readers, you know I would never hash you up a cook-chilled View. Though I wouldn't put it past Mrs M to weasel a way around the problem in extremis.

The fourth hour. I have nothing to show for my hour but success in Spider Solitaire. 40% of my battery remains.

Some time after I completed the second suit of clubs, Robert Mugabe’s younger brothers descended onto the bar stools like a flock of glossy starlings, dressed in charcoal suits, thick spectacles and shiny black skin.

There goes the neighbourhood.

Unlike the other Layabouts, these guys are loud. My experience of my contemporaries in the Bridge is that many of us do not have a great deal left to talk about. Every now and again, one comes across a freelancer in his dotage, who has an unstoppable need to share with you his joy in the confluence of the A627, A629 and A625 at Thrapston, but many male freelancers of a certain age prefer to watch the river or the game without comment. They will scrape together a conversation with a female or a foreigner, but it is not long before they cite an urgent match or report that requires them to hasten back to their cell.

These Roberts aren’t like this at all. They shout. They laugh. They have teeth.

When I wake up, a party of middle aged white men has replaced the Mugabes. They could be freelancers, though the intensity of the tan and the vibrancy of the polo shirts suggests golf is more likely than civil engineering. The beers arrive, and with it their voices, which reveal them as Scousers and Scots, sousing and sotting. Mountains of Tuskers and plastic glasses are piling up in front of them, and their laughter has risen to hysterical girlish gigles. These men are contrary to my theory, and shall therefore be ignored.

Nope: nothing whatever.

Time to go through yet another security check. I'll try again next week.