Figures in the numbers

Numbers in my eyes

I like the numbers game, the order of numbers, the mystery of numbers, the codes in numbers, the recall of numbers and puzzles based on numbers. One of the first things I learnt about numbers was how to determine a number was divisible by 3, as long as the numbers each when added up was a multiple of 3, it was divisible by 3, from that I could determine those divisible by 6 or 9.

Then every time I see a number I am doing a mental exercise in the realm of 3s and other multiples of the same besides trying to find numerical mnemonics that would help me remember long numbers, telephone numbers, dates, and other associations.

Puzzled by numbers

However, the numbers puzzle that most interests me is Sudoku, and whilst I don’t play it that often, I have had a few apps on my mobile phone to engage me in idle times to engage my mind to find the arrangement and order to complete the puzzle, sometimes to best my times, but mostly never to place a number in error through the process.

The easy puzzles are boring, I find no pleasure in them, sometimes the easier ones exhaust too much mental energy, whereas the fiendish and complex ones where sometimes you are taxed and almost frustrated as the minutes tick away until there is a breakthrough, what you have been staring at for long suddenly comes into the focus leading to the solution and satisfaction of personal triumph.

On the mind of travel

A leg to start off

My thoughts wander from arrival to departure in the things we control and the things we must consider for now and after. These were ruminations of the mind as I began my travel from South Africa back to the UK. There were three legs to my journey, from Cape Town to Johannesburg on a once rescheduled, then cancelled and then rebooked flight which was a British Airways flight managed by their partner and subsidiary Comair.

Arriving 3 hours early at the Cape Town International Airport, I was not allowed to check-in for another hour. A porter helped me from the Uber cab that got me to the airport and stayed with me through check-in to when I had to go through security. He was of a friendly disposition, a human resources manager before he retired and took on porterage to keep busy. Porters get by on tips, though licenced and uniformed, they are not salaried, hence, the jostling for custom. I was even asked if I needed a wheelchair; we laughed.

Let’s get ready to fly

The first leg was uneventful, nothing was served to us on that two-hour flight and my baggage was not checked through to Manchester. I had to collect my baggage and check-in at the AirFrance desk in Johannesburg for my flight to France. I had a 4-hour stopover in Johannesburg, much time to reminisce about the last 5 weeks and the thought that Brian still had another 3 nights in South Africa before returning home.

When the time came for boarding came for my long-haul flight second leg to Paris, by the time I arrived at the gate, I was unable to take advantage of priority boarding. I was in Zone 1 and Zone 4 & 5 were already boarding. The crowd as such that there it was unnecessary to claim that right, I settled into the queue as it took almost 15 minutes to board. I took my window seat beside an ageing couple in the middle aisle seats then made to the toilet to change into my pyjamas before handing my clothes to the air steward to be hung in the cupboard.

Miles and wiles

For a while now, I have taken no entertainment on the flight and concentrated more on the flight maps. We were to fly 5,530 miles or 8,900 kilometres over 10:17 hours to arrive at 05:35 hours local time in Paris. We took off on a Boeing 777-328(ER) at the speed of 210.6 mph (339 km/h) and soon reached cruising speed of 581 mph (935 km/h) and cruising height of 32,001 ft (9,753 m). We did after the Equator breach 10 kilometres, but I could not be bothered than much.

I maintain fascination with the place names I see on the flight map unsure of if I would ever visit, talk less of the logistics of getting there surrounded by my creature comforts. I am not one to countenance backpacking, a strain of colonial expectation greets my desire to have Sherpas and campaign furniture. If I deign to suffer such an experience.

Louis Trichardt, South Africa; Selebi-Phikwe, Maun, Mopipi all in Botswana, and Kuito (Silva Porto), Angola caught my attention before I fell asleep, tossing and turning, waking up 4 times to use the toilet. I had dinner but requested I be left alone at breakfast time which was to be around the unholy hour of 04:00 hours.

And then we land

After changing into my pyjamas, I was offered another window seat with presumably more space. We wore our masks throughout the flight except for when we had drinks and meals. At one point, the man sat in front of me acknowledged me. How uncanny, he was the same man who sat beside me on the first leg.

Arriving in Paris, I had a 7-hour stopover, I did not have to pass through immigration, but traversing Charles de Gaulle airport is never much a pleasure. I was soon through security and in the lounge that became quite busy by the time I left. The last leg was easy and after baggage reclaim clothed for the chill of winter, I was in a black cab, the window open and settled into what was supposed to be an imposed 10-day self-isolation. I look forward to another return journey that I so enjoy for the process and the purpose. One day, Brian will be by my side on the way to the land of happily ever after.

Writing for a possibility

Getting to a number

The last time I wrote this many blogs (298) in a year was in 2011, and only once have I written more blogs and that was way back in 2007, so, this is some sort of notification of an achievement.

It was in March that I found myself writing at least one blog a day until I broke my stride in August when I was dealing with an upsetting stalking activity. It is my hope that it is now behind me, as the stalker did decide to call themselves off their obsession, just at the time that I lodged a report and obtained a case number from the police.

Maybe it can be done

Since then, I have tried to write a number of blogs to match the number of days in the month, even if I do not write every day. It is not an easy task, you try to have completely formed ideas or good inspiration to put something down and I know I am not always successful.

This blog for instance is just a self-congratulatory blog that is not even a record. If I were to do that, I will have to write another 103 blogs in the next 62 days. It is possible, and it would probably take Brian feeding me the lines to make a muddle and a jumble of incoherence that might pass for a blog.

Incredible India: Streets Flummox GoogleMaps and Rotten Middlemen

Pains for trains

It was probably a wild thing to choose a Christmas morning for adventure by my standards. The opportunity had come to travel to Agra by train and I was so up for it.

Apparently, the tickets had been arranged and booked by a colleague though I became a bit suspicious when it appeared the night before things were more tentative than planned.

The schedule was a pre-dawn pickup from three locations for the train station but things began to go awry from that point. It suddenly became apparent how inscrutable the street and house numbering system was in New Delhi.

Beyond GoogleMaps

Apart from the major roads which had names and buildings with numbers; the residential areas normally known as Nagar; the houses were on plots with a numbering system that seems to have bedevilled GoogleMaps that they have not even bothered to assign names to the roads.

I found it incredible that so-called taxi drivers were clueless about the numbering system; in fact, it seems those who know; know their way by rote rather than by joining up the dots as they go.

At this time of the day, most roads were gated, fenced off and locked with Delhi Police barriers; we felt we were caught in an interminable maze as we tried to negotiate our way round the neighbourhood.

Recessive Geography Gene

What struck me more was how guards, workers and presumed residents could not help when asked for directions, it was as if the intricacies of basic geography that allowed for knowing where you were and charting where to go even in close proximity to your location had been so underdeveloped in their brains it had become a handicap.

Eventually, we packed into the taxi, overcrowded by one and made for the railway station only to get a confirmation from the railway officials that our tickets were literally duds. Thankfully, we had not paid for them yet.

Then a tout came in useful, he took us to “government registered” travel agent who said our tickets were not confirmed reservations but on a tentative waiting list with no guarantee that we might get to travel. Beyond that, we were also at the wrong station to use the tickets; one of the bureaucratic conundrums of India would have meant going another 20 kilometres to the appropriate station.

The middleman dirty man

In the end, we could not get a train, one was fully booked and another had been cancelled but we had the option of a four-wheel drive cab with high backs and head rests – the journey would definitely be a lot more comfortable than the one I had the week before.

It took 10 Indian minutes for the cab to arrive which by my watch was nigh on 40 minutes, at one point the issuing of an ultimatum with the threat to cancel the deal seemed to move things forward a bit and cab arrived. What we learnt off later on when we returned was the travel agent had earned a 33% commission with a 3-minute phone call and was ready to have us dumped at the point of embarkation close to midnight rather than ensure we were safely delivered to our hotels.

With a colleague of mine, I walked into his office and told him in clear terms that I will brook none of that nonsense, I guess he was taken aback at the forcefulness of my rebuke and our revelation of what his agency had creamed off to the driver that he had to ensure the driver took us back to our hotels.

That is just common courtesy, in all places where I have been picked up anywhere for tours, I have always been delivered back to my hotel as part of the deal.

It seems many businesses are able to get away with treating tourists to India shabbily with the impression nothing will come of it. Well, that will end with me, I have obtained the business cards of all these businesses and I will be publishing a list of people and businesses for tourists to avoid when in New Delhi.

We did it

My second journey to Agra had begun, this time with the possibility of doing the Taj Mahal, the Agra Fort and Akbar Tomb in Sikandra.

Whilst all the arrangements did not seem to fall into place, the day might well be quite eventful nonetheless and it was.

Numbers on lifts and people

Which floor please? 13

You probably have heard it many times before; there usually is no 13^th Floor in hotels, well, you do need to be in such a building to see that for sure.

Basically, superstition and irrational thinking is the not the exclusive reserve of uncivilized Barbarians or savages in the deep jungles of some faraway land, ever-present in the hub of the lands of liberty, freedom and godlessness, builders would not deign to number a floor 13.

In fact, One Canada Square, one of the somewhat imposing business offices in London does have a thirteenth floor, but it is uninhabited, rather it contains only air-conditioning equipment.

Well, I happen to be lodged on the 14^th Floor of the Novotel Hotel beside the British Library and there is no 13^th Floor. Oops! I let the cat out of the bag, I'm in London till tomorrow.

One of the lifts at Novotel Euston

Numbered people

This use of numbers also applies to another interesting but disturbing scenario; the Time Magazine takes us on a journey through a counter-insurgency raid just outside Baghdad where they had once cleared out insurgents but failed to keep free.

It transpires that they divided the village into numbered sectors and then issued a curfew or clampdown on the village; however, after they had written the sector numbers on the backhands of the women and the back of the necks of the men.

One would suppose this came out of the doctoral thesis of General Dr. David Petraeus on counter-insurgency measures.

The pictures did show distress amongst the family depicted, though, they sensibly did not append the numbers to the ladies necks because that would have involved undressing them by taking off their scarves. The indignity of it all was still evident.

History returning nicely

It is probably essential and expedient to ensure that none of the villagers are caught in other sectors of the town when there is a clampdown.

The writing is probably in indelible ink which would wash off, if the water supply is there in a few days since it would have been an overkill to hire Halliburton to tattoo the numbers on the people.

One cannot help but realize that numbers were part of the game in Holocaust Germany, the victims can still show you the number identifiers - amazing how history just creeps up on you without warning and because this is the War on Terror, it is not the same, only very different; thus, will go the argument.