A Meeting Of Worlds...
It was a scene I still cannot shake from my mind. Two alien cultures meeting for the first time and neither quite sure what to make of the other....
You can fly to lovely places from Antalya. And Luton too
It was in Antalya airport where I witnessed the scene. In front of me stood two people who were eyeing each other with mutual incomprehension and mistrust. Both groups of people were from European countries and so should not have been so astonished by each other’s presence. Yet so obviously different were they that it was how I imagined the Spanish conquistadors and Aztec warriors felt when they first set eyes upon each other in the steamy jungles of the Yucatan so many centuries ago.
Antalya airport in 1519
I had arrived at the airport after a short holiday in Turkey and soon found the queue for the EasyJet flight back to Luton airport. It was easy to recognize the queue without even reading the countersign since it was made up of people descended from the Anglo-Saxons and Vikings with a few Indian faces mixed in. Families with fiery red sunburned skin and an assortment of fierce neck and arm tattoos that made them look as though they were about to set sail on a raiding mission to some nearby land in search of plunder. These were the Brits, the victors of Agincourt and Trafalgar. Once rulers of the world.
We won on at Agincourt with chaps like him
Whilst waiting for my turn to check in I studied the people in our Luton queue with some interest, as though I was Darwin finding a Galapagos turtle for the first time. It had to be said, we were a motley bunch, comprised mostly of beer bellies, shaved heads and cheap gold rings that spelled out words like ‘nan’. And that was just the women. The clothes the people wore were mostly fake Gucci t-shirts and Ralph Lauren shorts. Rip-off Louis Vuitton bags were clutched proudly. Items bought in Turkish street markets to impress their friends back down the pub in Luton or Stoke with, but that didn’t look much like the original product they were impersonating.
The queue for the Luton flight
Their kids, equally burnt red by the Mediterranean sun, stared at their screens or wrestled each other in impromptu bouts of social dominance. Many of the men in the queue were in contrast, reasonably well-put together. Biceps and trap muscles that can only be built with dedication and locker room injections.
Our queue was full of laughter or ‘banter’ as we Brits like to call it. Banter is what you hear when Brits get together in groups. It’s a combination of jokes and put downs at someone’s expense. We might have a reputation for crap teeth and a shite diet but we do know how to take the piss out of each other mercilessly and not take too much offence. It’s probably our greatest achievement since we invented concentration camps and crumpets.
Good at concentration camps. Terrible at railways
We were all having a good time waiting for the flight home, but then slowly the banter started to quieten down in the queue and the Brits started to turn their heads to see what others had already noticed. Even the kid’s looked up from their bonnie-blue reels. The atmosphere had changed. Something had happened. When I turned, I saw it too. The Russians had arrived…
Russians in Antalya airport
At the check in counter next to us, the flight to Moscow had opened and suddenly families that looked nothing like us in the Luton queue began forming an orderly line. Tall, toned women of aristocratic beauty, as though carved from bronzed porcelain stood there in stoic silence securely clutching their expensive LV bags, bought not in Turkish markets but rather, in ornate 19th century Moscow arcades. They had long fingers with perfectly manicured nails that looked like eagle’s talons. The descendants of those who burnt their own capital to hinder Napoleon. These weren’t Europeans as we knew them. They were mysterious. The ever-hyped enemy. Scythians from the distant steppe.
When the British mum's saw the Russians, they felt some kind of insecurity that made them bark orders at their kids to behave and get up off the floor. 'Wayne, leave ya sister alone! I won't fucking tell ya again!'
There was a tribe called the ‘Nogays’. Why don’t we learn that in school?
Unlike those British children who rolled around on the dirty terminal floor as they waited in the queue with their parents, the Russian children stood in neatly pressed clothes with ramrod straight posture instilled in them by their piano teachers at the conservatory and Dagestani sambo instructors. They didn’t smile or talk to their parents or joke around like the British kids did. They had no inclination for such triviality. Instead they were probably too busy mentally reciting a Lermontov poem or mulling over whether the Brothers Karamazov was a greater book than Crime and Punishment. Zero fucking banter.
Zero fucking bants.
The two queues eyed each other for the first time with a mixture of bemusement on our side and barely hidden contempt on theirs. The Brits, for so long the winners of life’s birth lottery, children of an economic powerhouse built on the backs of resources stolen from malaria ravaged countries, looked over at the Russians and no doubt felt somewhat bewildered, slowly coming to terms mentally with the stark reality that we were obviously no longer the masters of the universe. Our post-Brexit passport was proof of that. We were now the Bangladeshis of Europe, both literally and figuratively. The sick men of Europe. Nobody fucking respected us anymore. We had been overtaken by the Slavs in terms of both economic output and fashion. All we were good at these days was knife crime and arresting people for Facebook posts.
A better passport than mine
And however much the families in the Luton queue tried to rationalize it mentally, there was no hiding the fact. The Russians we were looking at were no longer the same people of the early 1990s who had sold themselves for hard currency in the lobbies of the Metropol for a chance of a way west. The playing field had levelled since Yeltsin had drunkenly stumbled around the world. Like or hate him, Putin, it had to be said, had steadied the hulking Russian ship and steered it away from the reef. You could be sent to the gulag or the front in Russia for a joke about Putin but your family would at least still holiday in Dubai or turkey whilst you got blown up by a Ukrainian drone. Yes, Britain now had all the pronouns but Russia had all the resources.
I could imagine the Brits were looking at the well turned out Russians with their well stamped passports and were thinking, 'I thought we had fucking sanctioned them?! How come they look better than us?' Propaganda doesn't work so well when you see the enemy in the flesh.
We are royally fucked if Russia invades
And on the faces of the Russians in the Moscow queue there were also looks of bewilderment as they studied us Brits intently and close up for the first time. I instinctively knew what they were thinking when they saw for themselves that we were not carved of porcelain like them but rather of lumpy grey cement etched with laughter lines from years of merciless banter. They thought ‘these are not the Brits of Jerome K Jerome who punted on the Thames.’ Their surprise was obvious.
How the world sees us
I stood of course with my feet metaphorically in both queues amused at it all. Observing both sides. British, but to large extent shaped by the Slavic lands I had passed through so many times. A part of me wanted to shout out to the Russians ‘hey, I'm not with these people! Well, not completely anyway.’ But I couldn’t betray my nation like that no matter how much it has sunk under the thieves and weak-chinned wankers who rule us. It wasn’t completely the people’s fault we had been sold out. Love ‘em or hate ’em, this daft bunch in the Luton queue were my people. We might not have the oil but at least we had the banter.
Me before YouTube allowed me to afford a dentist
Eventually the check-in queues shrunk to trickles and the two sides who had studied each other so intently across the short divide turned away and left for their own lands just as the Tsar’s soldiers and Mongol warriors on horseback had done so many centuries ago on a misty riverbank on the edge of Muscovy.
The battle of Kalka River