A Window of Relief - 19 April 2002

After the ordeal of a transcontinental flight I pattered into my long-time San Francisco bed at nine in the evening and slept for 13 hours - seven hours at a stretch.

This, I think, is the record of a lifetime.

The only time I recall ever being deaf and blind to everything going on in the world for seven hours was when my father took me on my first trip to London with the express purpose of seeing the great, the sublime, JB Hobbs, the greatest living batsman of his day.

That was my express purpose. My father's purpose was to let me see Mr Bernard Shaw's new play - St Joan.

We took an all-night train from Manchester but the prospect of seeing the great one, much like a 15-year-old violinist anticipating an audience with Beethoven, kept me alert and on the qui vive.

On the lookout for what or whom? Well for some lout who might fumble the switches at Crewe and send the train off into the West Country. You never know on your first overnight train trip.

So I stayed on watch and after breakfast at the railway station we went straight off to the Oval.

We settled down on the delicious, grassy edge of the boundary and waited for our beloved Lancashire team to start its innings, after which Hobbs was due to appear.

Next thing I knew there was a lovely shower of applause, not heavy but fresh and rousing.

It roused me anyway from the longest sleep of my life but I can say with my hand on my heart I once saw Jack Hobbs - not batting but walking his way back to the pavilion after, I was told Lancashire, had played an innings and Surrey had just suffered the loss after his half century of - guess who? - John Berry Hobbs.

The excuse for my current stretch of insensibility was, I mentioned, the transcontinental flight.

So what's so exhausting about a five and a half hour trip, flying at a steady, totally unturbulent 35,000 feet?

Well friends it's not the 35,000 feet, it's the 6,000 feet that gets you, gets me - I apologise for explaining something that I'm constantly amazed to find needs explaining to rational, educated grown-ups, even well along in years, who have lived through the whole lifetime of the jet airplane.

This may only prove again that most of my rational, grown-up, educated friends are pretty sophisticated when it comes to Kierkegaard or Stockhausen but are stuttering babes over such things as air pressure inside and outside an airplane.

So let's begin quickly with why most people assume - according to an aviation survey, the vast majority - assume, whether they fly or not, that whatever height your plane eventually settles on or moves to, the pressure inside the plane will be what it was while you were idling on the ground.

I thought so through my first few years of the jet's existence until I ran into a man in Athens, a man name of De Havilland.

The mere recital of his name excited me at the prospect of meeting a relation of, maybe the brother of, one of my favourite movie actresses - Olivia De Havilland.

Well it turned out he'd been asked that before and he was a third cousin or something.

What was more to the point we're approaching, he was in or close to the family aviation business and he told us briefly the early, grim history of the commercial jet.

In the early 1950s the firm of De Havilland had perfected - the Comet, was it not? - to the point that its entry into commercial flying was due any minute.

It began in fact. But within a month or two months, less or longer - I'm sorry I'm away from the books - two of these planes blew up.

These accidents set back regular commercial jet flying for several years, till, I believe, 1958.

The subsequent inquiry revealed, it was said "a structural defect."

Maybe so but the crucial truth came out that both planes had been pressured at something close to ground zero.

The principle that had been violated was, I believe, much the same as the one that caused my Long Island neighbours' first floor windows to break and burst during a hurricane.

You're always warned when a hurricane is on its way to have at least one bottom window open an inch or two.

That room will be drenched for sure, but being drenched is better than having the windows explode or implode on you, which is what happens if the room or rooms become tight drums of unrelieved pressure.

So the airplane designers discovered that you had to leave a similar, so to speak window of relief, and nowadays whatever height they eventually reach the jets are pressured to remain at 6,000 feet.

The only laymen aware of this are people with a heart condition.

The first time they know about it is when they go to the bathroom - panting a little, shortness of breath sets in, in folks like me who don't have that as a normal symptom.

After an hour or two of living at an altitude at which I would not have played golf it is possible for such people to have what is dully but clinically called an "episode".

Most commercial jets in this country that fly for four or more hours at a stretch routinely carry oxygen or can provide it on order. Airplane companies that don't, please take notice.

Anyway a trans-American flight for any nonagenarian is nothing to recommend - oxygen or no oxygen.

However, after the subsequent, marvellous 13 hours I had a lush breakfast - delicious cream of wheat with the brown sugar (no raisins - verboten) with milk, a few dollar-sized pancakes (those would be thin crepes to you) lavish with the tangy butter that isn't butter but actually delicious if you like butter - vegetable spread - some maple syrup and pot of decaff.

And here I was in the position of any ordinary morning citizen, no special knowledge, far from what we journalists call reliable sources, with three newspapers I did not intend to look at.

Theoretically I was, as I used to say, on holiday, as the British say, just like an ordinary citizen - had breakfast, ready for the papers.

I peeped and at first sight I had a shocker: A drastic U-turn in the Congress and the first wave of public demonstrations against Israel.

Only last week, having said that surely the Jewish population of New York city was heavily in Israel's favour, I was about to add that they, like the Congress, had been, if not as silent as the grave, publicly unheard from.

But last weekend there was a great rally - anti-Israel rally - in Washington and not mainly of Jews or non-Jews but citizens of all sorts and faiths with (and this was the surprise) congressmen and senators - Democrats.

Since 11 September the Democrats have faithfully backed the president in Afghanistan and in support of the alliance of nations that are trying to track al-Qaeda and other terrorist organisations.

But the very magnitude of the effort to root out villains from dark corners in 36 countries does not lend itself to vigorous party debate.

Nothing like, shall we say, abortion or the scandal of campaign financing.

But the scope of Mr Sharon's incursion into the West Bank is what did it.

And what triggered this outburst of public feeling? The emergence, after seven months of patriotic loyalty of the Democrats as a party of opposition was without doubt Mr Sharon's simple refusal to heed Mr Bush's request to withdraw his forces now.

Mr Sharon - against the world it seemed - simply said Well, yes brother, but in my own time.

Such is the adamant quality of Mr Sharon's character that it's doubtful any previous president of the United States would have begged to better effect. But in the result President Bush is seen to be ineffectual.

And so, for the first time, as one paper put it, the Democrats have found their first foreign policy opening since September 11.

Both wings of the Democrats have gone for the president.

Senator Joe Lieberman pounded him from the right this weekend for losing his "moral clarity" on terrorism.

But Senator Kerry and others from the left for not solving the unsolvable.

As for the conservative side the Wall Street Journal, which has been the most robust supporter of the president, practically from the day of his inauguration, suddenly blames him as a new George Bush who has abandoned the old George Bush, a man with principles, and one who has lost his foreign policy bearings.

The journal was against any American policy incursion into Mr Sharon's military incursion.

Now it says "The same elites who urged him into this morass are now blaming Mr Bush for every rejection Powell receives on his cease-fire mission.

"Ronald Reagan and Richard Nixon never dispatched a secretary of state for such duty unless both sides were prepared to deal." And that, alas, is true.

The journal then shows the iron beneath the slapping palm with a surprising conclusion.

First it scolds him for deserting his free trade principles by slapping that tariff on steel, and ends by recalling that he built up a well of credibility during the war in Afghanistan and that's where he should look for guidance.

He ignored the global kibitzers who predicted a quagmire and unleashed United States power and diplomacy to depose the Taleban and break up al-Qaeda.

He can regain the moral and foreign policy high ground now if he rediscovers his principles and dedicates his administration to the cause of liberating - wait for it - Iraq.

Ah, so!

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