In Praise of Savagery

But when I saw it on the television, back then, what I thought was that it was comedy, and I thought that it was something that someone, probably Benny Hill himself, had made up.

It wasn’t until I chose an Aeroflot flight to Nairobi in preference to one with Saudi Air—for the sake of saving £5—that I realised it was actually a closely observed documentary. Except that with Aeroflot the experience lasted for eighteen hours each way, and the joke, if ever there was one, wore thin considerably sooner.

It was not so much the length of the flight, although it was, all in all, more than twice as long as you might have expected, given the distance. This was down to all the stops—stops which included several hours in Larnaka airport; followed by eight very long hours sitting on the floor in Moscow airport, there not being enough chairs there for all who wanted them; followed then by several hours in the sweltering airport in Aden, in the People’s Democratic Republic of Yemen, which at that time had rows of bullet-holes in the windows from the recent coup attempt.