Deleted Excerpts

THE CINEMA… Deleted excerpt from Chapter 8 of ‘A Pilot’s Guide to Corporate Aviation’

I beg your pardon – go to the cinema? Have you lost your mind? No. I will never go to the cinema again for as long as I live, thank you very much. Not in England, anyway. Last time I went to the cinema, I thought that for once in my life I had got a row all to myself but just as the lights went down, the door at the bottom of the auditorium opened to reveal a shaft of light and two hulking silhouettes stretching out across the carpet. There were plenty of spare seats to choose from but I watched with a growing sense of doom as the two massive shapes began their crinkling, goodies-laden ascent. Half way up they stopped, conferred, pointed straight at me, and the next thing I knew they were squeezing their way along the row towards me. Horrified, I saw they were cradling towers of popcorn and giant-sized cups of fizzy drinks. They edged towards me, sat down on top of me, wriggled themselves comfortable for a few minutes, and then assailed me for the next two and a half hours with eating noises. Popcorn eating noises as follows: a dry, open-mouthed cracking sound initially, then an open-mouthed squelching sound and finally a close-mouthed munching sound (in stereo, of course, because there were two of them; husband and wife). Drinking-through-a-straw noises? Sure: a hoarse, scrabbly sucking sound, followed by a chunky rattling sound, followed by an elongated gasping sound. I sat there for two hours, trapped in a state of physical hysteria; squirming, whimpering, crying, silently screaming. Finally, right at the climax of the film (it was Schindler’s List 2 we were watching, so it was very dramatic), the husband next to me turned to his wife and said: “I’ve finished my popcorn.” ‘I don’t believe it’, I thought as my body sagged with infinite relief. “No, here you go,” said the woman as she reached down to the floor. “We’ve got two more boxes down ‘ere….”

University 2

If ever you’re a guest in my parents’ house, you’ll walk past a photograph hanging in the hall that was taken on the day I graduated from university. It’s no different from the university graduation photograph of anybody else’s son: the gown, the scroll, the grey 80’s background, the tasselled hat. To look at me you’d assume I was now a successful doctor or lawyer. You’d know in one glance that I had a beautiful wife, two beautiful children, a golden Labrador, a sports car, a motorbike, a comfortable three bedroom house. You would. I look like a good son, a good man. Peer closely at my face: the eyes have a cheeky twinkle to them, don’t they? There is nothing false about that smile. It is a smile of relief that university is over, and a smile of hope for the start of a daunting yet exciting new life.
But I can’t help seeing something else when I look at that photograph. I see something behind those eyes; I see something underneath that smile. These university graduation photographs – you get them in English T.V dramas and English newspapers. You get them on the six O’clock news. Photographic proof, say, of where heroin began its standard, infamous subtraction; or the abiding image of a cheerful and talented young man abducted on his way home one dark, cold, English night, his bones discovered twenty five years later in the back garden of some semi-detached shed on some semi-detached street.
At school, everyone thought they had to try and get into Oxford or Cambridge University. The teachers all told us we had to try and get into Oxford or Cambridge University. Me, I tried to get into Oxford and Cambridge University. You need to know about this. You do. This is what happened:
I tried to get into Oxford University first. My course of choice was ‘French and Italian’ because that was the course I wanted to study, and my college of choice was Somerville College for no better reason than I’d heard it had the highest number of girls in it. I went up for my interview while I was still in my last year at school. I seem to remember not doing any revision because I thought it would be a kind of get-to-know-you session, an informal chat over cups of tea and slices of cake. Also, I’d heard all the legendary tales of Oxford interviews; instead of asking me boring questions about literature, they would most probably do something unexpected like throw a tennis ball at me to see if I would catch it. Right?
Wrong.
The best way to describe my Oxford interview would be to call it a savage and humiliating high-powered literary attack. There were three of them; two thin brainy old men wearing tweed jackets and corduroy trousers, and one fat, vicious old woman wearing much the same thing. Between them they managed to expose a number of gaps in my literary knowledge. It was chastening stuff. Towards the end, I remember one of them asking me: “Why did you choose Somerville College?” and in a fit of ingenuousness I replied: “Because of all the girls, ha ha ha!” I was hoping that they might at least give me marks for candour but apparently this turned out not to be the case. Some days later I received a letter thanking me for my interest in Somerville College but urging me strongly not to reapply the following year.
After finding out my A level results (three A’s and one E – I know. Not bad. Cheers), I decided to launch my assault on Cambridge University. I chose King’s College for no better reason than I had heard it was one of the newer colleges and therefore, I hoped, less high-brow and more readily disposed towards a hipper, more street-wise student like myself. This time I did the sensible thing and chose to try and sneak in through the back door, so to speak, by opting for a more esoteric course, the (admittedly) slightly impractical ‘Medieval French and Latin’.
The interview went very badly, though. Again, I was faced with a cruel and miserable panel of intellectual dragons that once again exposed some serious gaps in my literary knowledge.
“So tell us, Mr. Waites: why do you want to study Medieval French and Latin?”
“Because I really enjoy them,” I replied enthusiastically. “I mean I love Medieval French, and I also love Latin, so………”
“I see…..”
At this point I thought that maybe I was doing alright, but then one of them asked me if I had read some or other famous Medieval French text.
“Yeah, of course I have,” I retorted defensively.
“Excellent! Well would you mind telling us a bit about it?”
This was a low-blow, ever there was such a thing. From their point of view it was also check-mate. But I was determined not to go down without a fight. Summoning every last ounce of my dwindling powers of improvization, I gave it my best shot:
“Ummm……………umm……………ummm………….”
I remember them looking at each other with some agitation. The woman, perceiving my distress, leant forward and, in a kindly tone of voice, asked:
“Ross, can you tell us why you chose King’s College?”
“Oh,” I replied, brightening up. “Well, uh, actually, umm, no. Not really, I’m afraid. No – hold on. It’s one of the newer colleges, isn’t it?”
At this point the three of them chuckled at what I took to be an ‘in joke’.
“Not exactly,” the woman explained. “So in other words you don’t know anything about the history of the college?”
“Uh – no. Not really. Not at all, in fact. Sorry.”
Of course I can’t recall word-for-word how the interview went, but you can rest assured that the above dialogue constitutes a fairly close re-enactment. I received a letter sent by ‘Express Courier’ some twenty four hours later in which I was thanked for my interest in Kings College, but also informed that, alas, I had been unsuccessful in my application. I think it was even suggested that Cambridge University as a whole was perhaps not best suited to my particular needs. I remember feeling quite offended at the time, but I soon got over it. In fact it was just as well I didn’t win a place at Oxford or Cambridge: I later found out that I would have had to write two essays a week if I had. What a close call! I mean, I would never have applied if I had known that. No siree. Where I ended up I could barely manage one essay a term, as you’ll soon find out.

Like all posh people, I took a gap year between school and university, but unlike all posh people I didn’t travel to India and work in a leper colony, or spend nine months in Colombia building a school for under-privileged children. Oh, no. My gap year C.V can boast no such rip-snorting-jolly-good-fun-oh-yah-it-was-amazing spiritually uplifting, mind-broadening upper class rough-and-tumbles. Quite the contrary. Indeed, an honest C.V of the kinds of things I got up to in my gap year might comprise some of the following: going to outdoor raves, experimenting with dangerous mind-altering drugs, working in factories and offices and pretending to be working class, going abroad fleetingly, running out of money promptly, calling up my father to have money wired to me immediately, spending the money instantaneously, calling up my father desperately, being refused more money angrily, being airlifted back to England expensively, working in factories and offices suicidally, etc etc. You get the general idea.
And so it was that I never really got over the initial shock of arriving for my first year at Edinburgh University. As I recall, I drove up all the way from London at the harrowing climax of an ill-advised three day speed-binge to be confronted by the four people with whom I would be sharing my university flat: 1) An ex-public school head boy rower, 2) An ex-public school rugby-playing born again Christian, 3) a fifty year old mature student from India who was studying chemistry, and – last but (certainly) not least: 4) A thirty-something-year-old mature student from France who was studying medicine. (This French guy: I’ll never forget him. I’d be in my room at around three in the morning getting stoned with half a dozen other ravers when all of a sudden there’d be a slow, mournful knock on the door and there before us would appear this lugubrious apparition. He’d be wearing matching pyjamas, dressing gown, and slippers, and he’d have a crestfallen, heavily put-upon expression that of course looked even more hysterical because we were all stoned. The funny thing was – and I don’t know if this was because he was French or not – he used to look exactly like a frog! Jean-Michel: listen mate. In the highly unlikely event you’re reading this – I’m sorry, O.K? I really am.)
But it wasn’t only my flat mates I had a problem with. To my dismay, I soon discovered that Edinburgh University was chock-full of the kinds of people I had spent my gap year going out of my way to avoid. Posh people, in other words. Posh people being posh. Posh people being as posh as they possibly could. Posh people with their dinner parties and their bottles of dry white wine and their idiotic toy-town cocaine. Posh people, in other words, hell-bent on being as posh as their posh parents were before them. No wonder the Scots hated them. No wonder I hated them.
And I found out an astonishing, lamentable fact in my first week at university: out of two hundred and fifty people in my last year at school, over a hundred of them were now studying at Edinburgh.
Woops…..

Let’s talk now about some of my academic achievements during that first year.
Well, the course I studied was: Latin and Spanish, with Architectural History as an extra subject. Architectural history we’ll be discussing shortly; Latin I chose because I had been doing it for so long that I found it easy; and Spanish I chose because it reputedly had the highest number of hot chicks in it.
It didn’t.
Maybe I got a bad year or something, but as far as I could see, the course was dominated almost exclusively by men. Oh yes – and with a few serious-minded mature students thrown in (vindictively, I felt) for good measure. Also, the girls were all hard working Scottish types, surprisingly ugly when you think about it, and to whom, moreover, I never once got around to talking. On the plus side – this was brilliant – there was one fifty year old Scottish mature student called Gordon who used to speak Spanish – I kid you not – with a thick Glasweigan accent. This guy was a riot. He used to bustle in half way through tutorials and merrily excuse himself (you have to do this next bit with a Scottish accent, by the way) at the top of his voice: “Hola! Lo siento mucho de llegar tarde!” This used to lead to severe hysteria-suppression-induced stomach cramps amongst those already present. Somewhat cruelly, I used to do impressions of him after class that were said to be almost as legendary as the man himself (by the way, listen mate: in the highly unlikely event you’re reading this: I’m sorry, O.K? I really am). The other good thing was that we only had tutorials once a week, and – even better, although this did surprise me initially – there were no lectures.
Or so I thought.
Perhaps the worst moment of my first year at university came towards the end when I was solicitously accosted in the street by one of the aforementioned Scottish girls. The conversation went something like this:
“Hi Ross!”
“Hi umm………”
“So which poet are you writing your essay on?”
“I beg your pardon?”
“Which poet are you writing your essay on?”
“WHAT.”
“You know. Which poet from the lectures are you writing your essay on?”
“Oh thank Christ! Fuck you got me worried there for a minute. No, no sweetheart. I think you’ll find they’re called tutorials. Not lectures! Don’t worry, I used to make the same mistake as you.”
I had said these words in a tone of paternal, didactic indulgence while at the same time reaching out and giving her an affectionate squeeze on the shoulder.
“No,” the girl quizzically informed me as the blood instantly began gushing out of my temples. “We have lectures and tutorials.”
You know, I’ve often wondered what my face must have looked like as I learnt this earth-shattering news; as I grappled to come to terms with the fact that I had managed to miss a whole year of lectures. What do you think my face looked like? I’ll tell you what I think my face looked like: I think it looked like the face of Detective Brodie in Jaws when he sees the shark for the first time and Spielberg does this thing where the horizon disappears backwards while the subject stands still and then Brodie goes: “I think we’re going to need a bigger boat.” You know? That’s what I think my face looked like. (Scottish girl: listen, I’m sorry I can’t remember your name, but in the highly unlikely event you’re reading this and you can remember who I am and you can remember what my face looked like when you told me I had missed a year of lectures, do you think you could get in touch with my agent or something because I would dearly love to know. Cheers).
O.K so let’s move on to Architectural History now. This was the extra subject I mentioned earlier, and it proved to be an absolute godsend in the context of the other two courses I was studying. I don’t know why I chose it, really, but that hardly mattered because essentially it was one of these New Age self-study type courses that I seem to remember were gaining popularity in universities at the time. Check this out: not only were there no tutorials, but lectures were optional(!) and – best of all – there was no exam at the end of it! I saw it as a nice gesture by the university that effectively said: ‘Hey guys, we know how hard it is to balance work and play when you’re a student but we just want to show you that it’s not all doom and gloom. Here, have a little R&R on us: if you like the subject then great; if you don’t, well what the heck, there’s no harm done.’ That kind of thing.
Unfortunately, I found out that Architectural History did have an exam at the end of it. Even more unfortunately, I found out that Architectural History had an exam at the end of it at the end of it, which meant roughly three days before the exam was due to take place. Those three days constitute a particularly wretched time of my life (what with trying to juggle revising for a Latin exam that happened to fall on the same day), and to be honest, I don’t want to talk about it too much, if you don’t mind. What I will tell you is that, for the exam, you were supposed to revise the work of five architects so that you were in a strong position to answer questions on three of them. The catch was: you didn’t know which three architects were going to come up. I was so pressed for time that I felt I had no option but to take a gamble and revise the work of three architects and hope for the best. God it was a nightmare. It was hell. (It was also around this time that I suddenly realized I had no interest in architects whatsoever – much less the stupid, boring buildings they had designed – while History, I now remembered, had always been the subject I hated most at school).
You can imagine my dismay when, after all that, I opened up the exam paper and discovered that only two out of the three architects I was pinning all my hopes on had come up. So I had gambled, and I had lost. Badly. Amusingly, I tried to bluff my way through the third architect but even I could tell that what I was writing was utter nonsense (I had never even heard of the bloke). My only wish is that the examiner who marked my paper was able to see the funny side and have a good laugh at my expense, but I suspect that my overall grade – 38% – suggests that this might not have been the case.
But wait – there’s more.
Because I had failed to achieve the required pass mark of 50%, I had to come back to university in the middle of the summer holidays in order to take the re-sit. And guess what? I took the same gamble. And guess what? I failed again. And guess what? I got an even lower grade than I got the first time: 36% (I can show you the certificates if you don’t believe me). Not only that: because I had failed the re-sit, I had to carry an extra subject in my second year as a punishment. This never made any sense to me; if a student was so bad that he wasn’t able to handle a normal work-load one year, how the hell was he supposed to handle an extra work-load the next? But anyway, that was the way they did things, and that, in the end, was what I was forced to do.

My second year was actually more fun, though, if anything, and during it I acquired a number of skills that would go on to stand me in good stead for the rest of my adult life. I finally worked out how to have sex, for example, and I pretty much mastered the art of shop-lifting. Plus I was now living with two friends in a spacious flat which overlooked The Meadows and which, more importantly, was nearer the university (not that that managed to cure my ongoing punctuality problem mind you). The trouble with this flat was that each of us was too lazy to do his own washing-up, and too proud to do anyone else’s. As the first term progressed, the pile of plates and saucepans and glasses and cutlery got bigger and bigger until by the end of the year it pretty much sat in an unsightly, stinking, fly-blown pile on the side of the kitchen sink. Whenever one of us needed to use a plate or a glass or whatever, we would slimily prize out the only item we needed, wash it up, and then stubbornly return it to the pile. Our girlfriends, too, refused to go near it (the pile, I mean, although this later grew to include a 100 metre radius of the flat itself), but one suspects this was less to do with pride or feminism per se, and more to do with genuine physical revulsion.
The upshot of this unhappy state of affairs was that the flat soon became overrun with rodents. Now, I’ve always loved mammals, especially mice, but even I have to say that I used to find it more than a little eerie when I would come home at the end of a long day, sit down on the sofa in the kitchen (which also doubled up as the living room, incidentally) and after what got as low as ten seconds, start seeing mice appearing like swarming termites out of my peripheral vision.
O.K listen, we need to move on from all this, but I just want to say two more things about this flat: 1) I seriously think I managed to break the unofficial intercollegiate record for the longest time a student has ever gone without washing his sheets (one year) although to be fair, I didn’t actually know that sheets needed to be washed, and 2) This is a short but amusing anecdote: one of my flat mates hadn’t got laid all year but towards the end he finally (foolishly) brought a girl back to the flat one night, welcomed her in, took off her coat, opened the door to the kitchen/living room where both of them were confronted by the energetic sight of my other flat mate having a wank to a hard-core porn film (not surprisingly, both relationships petered out soon after).
My second year at university may have been more fun, but that didn’t mean that my academic woes didn’t continue unabated. Now that I knew about lectures, I began attending them assiduously enough, I suppose, but after a while I found myself in the habit of gathering my things together after the first ten minutes, then trotting down the stairs and straight out of the door. I was still studying Latin and Spanish but because I had failed Architectural History (twice), I now had no option but to take ‘The Spanish Civil War’ as an extra subject. I didn’t really enjoy it, though, because it had a lot to do with history, and also because I found both the lecturer and what she was lecturing about really quite incredibly boring. There was something else, too: the longer time went on, the more of a complex I developed that I didn’t actually know which side was fighting which. I wanted to ask one of my fellow students to perhaps enlighten me as to this crucial fact but I was far too embarrassed. It’s like when you’ve been a qualified pilot for a few years and there’s some basic technical question you don’t know the answer to but you’re too scared to talk to anyone about it in case they tell management and you end up getting fired. After a couple of terms, and after I felt the situation was well beyond a joke, I finally cornered a frumpy Scottish girl on the way out of lectures and lured her out to a bar under the pretence of taking her out on an afternoon date. What I needed to do was somehow contrive a conversation with her during which she might unwittingly reveal to me whether the Republicans were fighting with The Nationalists or against them, or whether, indeed, either of the two sides was fighting in ‘The Spanish Civil War’ at all.
After about two hours of talking to her in a round-about way, I eventually succeeded in manoevring her into position:
Me (head tossed back): Ha ha ha! That’s so funny! But I mean seriously, what’s your opinion about the two sides that were fighting each other? Everyone knows who they were, obviously, but who do you think they were REALLY?
Her: Well you had your Nationalists fighting against your Republicans………
Me (scoffingly, almost arrogantly): Yeah, yeah, of course.
Her (laughs): Sorry no, what am I talking about? The Nationalists were fighting with The Republicans………
Me (scoffingly, almost arrogantly): Yeah, yeah, of course.
Soon after I had obtained this vital information, I abruptly made my excuses, gratefully paid for the drinks, and left. Now, you’re probably thinking that I went on to fail my second year, aren’t you? Well you’d be wrong. I passed my second year, but I owe it all to one man; one young man who tutored and nurtured me every night leading up to, and all night during, exams; one fellow student who selflessly and with ironical good humour took pity on me and extended his hand towards me; who guided me through the mire, the maelstrom, the miasma, the morass, who put his arm around my shoulder and told me that everything was going to be alright. And it was. Who was that man? He goes by the name of Tom Dalzell. I’ve since lost contact with him, but Tom: if you’re reading this, buddy, I dedicate this section to you. Get in touch mate, or if anyone reading this knows him, tell him to get in touch. Thanks a lot.

After my second year was over, I went to Madrid for a year and then managed to talk my way in to completing my fourth year at University College London. It was a grand coup. It was my second chance, my lucky break. The powers that be at Edinburgh had predicted me a third in finals if I ever went back, a low 2:2 at best, so there was no way I was going to hang around there anymore. But it didn’t matter where I was: all in all, I would have to say that I hated my time as a student. O.K, sure, I enjoyed going to pubs and clubs and taking drugs (who wouldn’t?) but the academic side of things really spoilt it, for me. I hated tutorials, just as I hated most tutors. I hated lectures, just as I hated all lecturers. The library terrified me: all those books, all those bibliographies, all those computers, all those students – they always looked like they knew exactly what they were doing, and I hated them for it. Me: I never knew what the fuck I was doing. Or supposed to be doing. Or how I was supposed to be doing it. Or where I was supposed to be doing it. Or whom I was supposed to be giving it to. Or by when. And essays? Essays were the worst. I think it’s even possible that I hated them more than anyone. EVER. I only had one essay a term for each subject, but that proved more than I could take. I would be given extension after extension after extension, and then have those extensions extended and extended and extended and extended until eventually, after all the lying, the pleading, the begging, and the bribing, there I would be, in my room, days after term had officially ended, at my desk, weeping, squirming, cramping and groaning in a state of amphetamine-induced psychosis as I churned out some amphetamine-induced, psychotic, unintelligible literary splurge.
But why am I telling you all this? What’s the point, I hear you ask? My point is this: all that borrowing and worrying and scrimping and saving and drinking and snorting and reading and revising and felt-tip pen marking and red-biro underlining; all that, in the end, counts for NOTHING. I’m not saying that I’m wholly representative of every ex-public school boy who studied a Humanities degree at university, but to an extent, I am. University, unless you’re study a degree like Chemistry or Medicine, is a complete waste of tax-payer’s money. It is! Some public school beef cake gallops up to Edinburgh University to study History of Art so that he can do what exactly? So that he can go and work for an investment bank in the city and drive around Chelsea in his Porsche 911 at an average speed of 4 m.p.h. Something’s not quite right here, is it? I mean – look what I did, for crying out loud. I studied Latin and Spanish but not once did I have an interview for any job that had anything to do with Spanish, much less Latin. Not only that: when I watch T.V in Spanish or Italian when I’m away somewhere down route, I can’t understand a single word they’re saying! For years my Latin and Spanish degree got me as far as a succession of horrific temping jobs on the Slough trading estate. And then, as you know, I went off and became a pilot. Medieval Spanish and Latin with Aviation as an extra subject: now that’s an homogenous combination, isn’t it?
Still, I’m sure it’ll come in handy in the cockpit sooner or later when I’m finally able to quote great chunks of Virgil or Cervantes as the plane plummets towards the earth in a ball of flames…..