Contact! by Jan Morris Page B

heard–and surely it’s chopped kidneys? …’ But then Ethel, my hostess told me, seldom had unhappy premonitions. ‘Well, one would hardly expect her to, would one, actually in one’s own drawing room?’
    Birth of a taste
    I had disliked whisky all my life, but stopping to eat my corned beef sandwich in one of the most famous Scottish distillery areas, I felt it my duty to try once more. I went to a nearby pub and asked for a dram of the local water of life, to drink with my victuals on a bench in the square outside. The barmaid looked at me quizzically. ‘I’m not sure the law allows it, but seeing as you’re a visitor…’ Looking cautiously around her, she poured into my plastic mug a full measure of single malt whisky–one of the very best, she said, from a distillery just down the road. I concealed it in my bagas I left the inn, and turning at the door I saw her winking at me conspiratorially, as if I had poached a salmon. No constable intervened, though. No revenue man expostulated. Unwrapping my sandwich, there on the bench in the square I took a cautious swig of the whisky, and, dear God, I have never looked back.
    Hospitable cop
    I was a guest once at a Buckingham Palace reception for publishers and writers, and at the end of the evening, wishing to leave, I looked around for somebody to thank. Queen, princes, dukes and all seemed to have gone elsewhere, so I left anyway, and at the palace gates I found a policeman. ‘I was brought up,’ I told him, ‘to say thank you for having me when I’d been to a party, so as I can’t find the Queen or anybody to say it to, I’ll say it to you instead. Thank you very much for having me.’
    â€˜Not at all, madam,’ he replied. ‘Come again.’
    A glimpse of power, 1950s
    For a glimpse of power, try the Bolshoi at Moscow, when some gigantic Russian epic is being furiously enacted, with rolls of kettle drums and clashes of armour, a mammoth chorus open-mouthed, a clutch of heroes swelling in the foreground, with a passage and repassage of knights, horses, serfs, a frenzy of conical helmets and chain mail, banners dramatically waving, flames issuing from a backcloth,smoke, flashing beacons, the orchestra in a quivering fortissimo, the conductor wiping his sweating bald head, the enormous audience gripping its seats or craning from the high gilded balconies above the chandelier–then, in the middle of it all, you will glance across your neighbour’s shoulder to the great state box in the centre: and there will be sitting the most powerful man on earth, looking bored and rather glazed, a slight sad smile playing around the corners of his mouth, his wife, in a bun and brown sagging dress, demure and attentive at his elbow. You need not wait for the last act. Go home and sleep it off.
    Another time, perhaps
    In the Faroe Islands I repeatedly ran into groups of traditionally dressed folk persons, buckled and aproned, on their way to or from festivals of one kind or another. ‘We have been telling rhymes in Klaksvik,’ one practitioner told me as we sat together on the deck of a ferry, a celestial scene of mountain and fjord streaming by. ‘Long rhymes?’ I ventured to ask, thinking I might be fortunate to have missed them. ‘ Extremely long,’ he said with pride.
    At a Patagonian airfield
    When I was once hanging about an airfield in Patagonia, hoping to arrange a lift to the north, I noticed a small group of people, dressed apparently for après-ski, who seemed to dominate the waiting room with a kind of steely radiance.They looked very rich and very brassy and very thrusting. Their children were ill mannered but intensely vivacious, their women were gimlet eyed but seductive, their men had a feline Italian elegance to them; and unexpectedly, when I offered a smile in their direction, one and all suddenly, brilliantly, delightfully smiled back. I asked where