The Man With His Head in the Clouds

by Richard O. Smith

  It turns out this doesn’t impress her. We go in separate directions again, only tonight I call her name. She stops, and slowly swivels to face me, but doesn’t speak. I guess that’s because it is down to me to initiate the next line, since I called out her name. “Charlotte,” I repeat, “er... I... um... ahem... I... er...”

  All I have accomplished is to check that her name works. I say “Charlotte” aloud in order to receive brief attention from someone called Charlotte. Yeah, her name seems to be working properly. But she’s already starting to swivel back around. She’s making a twenty-degree angle turning away from me. I flounder: “I was... er...” Thirty degrees, “like um wondering... er... if...” Forty degrees. “Er...” Fifty degrees. I had genuinely rehearsed my lines too. Really, I had. Sixty degrees. You don’t leave this to chance, you have to have a line prepared. Seventy degrees. Not a good time for an actor to dry. Eighty degrees. Or a lonely teenage boy at an even lonelier bus stop either. Ninety degrees. She’s disappearing from view.

  In the end they say that life comes down to a small collection of vital moments, with only a few random pressured seconds allocated to each. The moment you applied for that job, made that proposal, accepted that offer, took that trip, didn’t see that cyclist, and asked that girl out.

  When they arrive you have to be standing in the right spot at the far post when the ball of opportunity comes to you, and despatch it past the goalkeeper of bad luck into the goal of fate. And then not be flagged offside for nicking someone else’s chat-up lines.

  I only have a few seconds left for a potential Big Life Moment. Her back is now half-turned. Then the words come to me in a flow: “They are showing a Fellini film at Blackfriars in town this weekend and I wondered if you’d like to go?” There, I had asked a girl out. “With me,” I clarify; hopefully unnecessarily, but in case she doesn’t realise I am proffering a date rather than a local “What’s On” service.

  Why is there nothing harder, or more painful or difficult, than the ageless dilemma of how do you tell a girl that you like her? You risk scorn, rejection, humiliation and heart-stopping agony - and future awkward bus journeys - if she doesn’t like you back. From now on receiving painful treatment at the dentist, climbing an industrial chimney, ascending in a hot air balloon - or even going upstairs to the top deck of a bus - ought to be a comparative doddle. Maybe Sadler only did what he accomplished to impress a girl called Charlotte.

  Charlotte surveys me. She looks up and down at my scuffed and unpolished shoes, then back up to my face where she maintains her scrutiny for a lengthy three or four seconds. Staring in silent, undisguised contempt, she holds her gaze with an expression that someone would reserve for viewing a fresh dog turd on their expensive, newly laid carpet. Slowly she turns around, gradually reaching the full 180 degrees until her back is facing me, and casually walks away, not even legitimising my painful heartfelt request with any answer.

  That contemptuous silence resonates so potently I can hear it today, blowing across those open, flat fields like a breeze strong enough to knock me off my feet. The moment is still loaded with a hurtful capacity sufficient to bring a good mood instantly toppling down, capsizing the happiest of thoughts. Its flinching acidity is undiluted by the passing decades. Great: first your voice breaks, quickly followed by your heart.

  On Thursday I board the bus. Charlotte gets on with two friends. Before systematically scurrying upstairs, she points at me, which results in her two friends collapsing into laughter. I don’t like girls any more. They’re much nastier than I expected. I may send for a “How to Become Gay” leaflet. I’ll buy a Soft Cell album.

  Instead I returned to my obstreperous male peer group. Desperate to fit in, I bought a Status Quo LP. It was rubbish.

  Looking back, on second thoughts I can’t be certain I hadn’t asked her if she wanted to see a Fellaini rather than Fellini film - the former being a crazy-haired Manchester United and Belgium midfielder. On third thoughts, I may have asked her if she wanted to see a fellatio film.

  Soon afterwards Charlotte’s house displayed a “For Sale” sign, and within a mere month she had moved from Lincolnshire. I never expected to see her again.

  Years later, I did.

  When living a dreary existence in a small-town Bedfordshire house with an aggressively hostile, steep, open-spiral staircase - the worst possible dwelling choice for an acrophobic bathmophobe like me. Plus the walls were so thin, the builders had presumably just overcome the failed delivery of wall partitioning one day by gluing back to back wallpaper to divide a house into two semis, thereby saving on the budget by not supplying a wall.

  It was a Friday night and I was watching Blankety Blank on BBC1. I recall exactly why I was watching Blankety Blank on my own on a Friday night - it was because my life officially sucked. The quiz show’s format was dependent on the perennial British obsession with mild innuendo. A suggestively rude caption being completed by a contestant whose suggested - and suggestive - answer scored a point for each of the six celebrity panellists’ answers it matched. Although the word “celebrity” was often deployed in its most elasticated form.

  Contestants were required to write down a single word that they thought the assembled celebrities were most likely to have selected as a response to complete the earlier statement. Something like: “The naked au pair discovered my husband had a massive...” And the answer would be “heart attack”. OK, perhaps not as extreme as that example, but you know where I’m coming from if you ever saw the show. And chances are that you did. Pivoting on a contestant’s ability to match the word choice of a celebrity panellist, the show ran for 23 years from 1979 to 2002

  Next door’s television sound would leak invasively into our lounge through the porous walls. Alison next door would ritually have distinctly audible sex on a Sunday morning, and very occasionally midweek (if, I assume, her partner Robin’s birthday fell outside a weekend). Then Alison and Robin divorced; and she kept the house. Ironically, the sex sounds increased dramatically after that.

  Imposing television noise bled through our permeable walls to such an extent that viewing any programme would depend on our neighbour’s decision to watch the same channel: otherwise it was like listening to conflicting separate stereo feeds. Some nights I would answer questions on the quiz show our neighbours were watching. Talking to my flatmate I would intermittently break away from our conversation to answer University Challenge questions from next door with “Cardiff City in 1927”, “Rhodesia” and “they’re all slang terms for Jeremy Paxman”.

  Alison soon settled on a new boyfriend, and after the carnal noises had peaked in the first few weeks of their budding relationship, a romantic autumnal chill evidently set in and sex reverted back to a strictly Sunday morning activity she performed along with the rest of the weekend chores. Weeks later there was a rare noise signifying midweek sex, like spotting a flower blooming at the wrong time of year, or an exotic bird in the wrong continent. I think I got our new neighbour a birthday card that lunchtime.

  One night I am having dinner - a microwavable meal for one either from a supermarket’s Lonely Gits meal-for-one selection or Oh Poor You economy range, while occasionally answering questions out loud: “the Treaty of Versailles”, “Gary Lineker”, “darkest Peru”. Then I attempt to read a newspaper silently, saying out loud between each paragraph “Siege of Stalingrad”, “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”, “Danger Mouse and Penfold”.

  Then the neighbours switch channels from the quiz and put on Blankety Blank. Giving up, I put it on too - might as well have pictures rather than just an audio feed. Stunned, I instantly recognise one of the two introduced contestants, giving viewers an over animated wave and toothy game show smile. It’s Charlotte Jones.

  Unmistakably her, before they confirm her name - that same aloofness that she cannot convincingly step out of for the TV cameras, her natural good looks relatively undiminished
by the passing years. Les Dawson then introduces her by name. Host Les then reads out a short phrase, confirming the show is spiked with mild innuendo: “A blind man was so excited to hear he was in a nudist colony that he fell over and bent his... blank.” Stick is clearly the answer. All the celebs write “stick” apart from Lorraine Chase who can’t spell - or write - so she draws a picture of one. Charlotte doesn’t say stick, she says something abstract like “hovercraft”. A nation collectively gasps “what an idiot”. Charlotte has scored nil out of six and immediate elimination.

  Les Dawson used his tenure as host to pleasingly undermine the show with comments like “I bet, love, you wish you’d stayed home and watched Crossroads instead.” Charlotte certainly wished she had stayed at home and watched a Fellini film because she had just suffered a horrid humiliation, played out on TV to a squirming nation. Charlotte’s ignominy was deliciously drawn out, elongated as six raspberry bleeps accumulated to display her 0/6 score. Her game show facial expression was punctured by a leaking smile and hissing resentment, with every revealed answer mismatch.

  As she was the losing contestant, her fate was for her part of the set to swing around while she disappeared out of view, her torment incongruously accompanied by inappropriately upbeat jangly music. Yes, fittingly she did the 180 degree disappearing-from-view silent swivel - this time for the entire Friday night peak time BBC1 national audience to witness, not just me at an abandoned bus stop in rural Lincolnshire all those years earlier. Yes, she continued with that courageous wave to camera, prompted by the floor manager, but she was incapable of hiding the stinging pain of disappointment in her eyes.

  The hurtful humiliation. The burning rejection. Oh, I could see the hurt. Did it make you cry, Charlotte? Did you cry for fully three hours afterwards and refuse to leave your room to have your tea? Did you Charlotte? Because if you did, it’s called karma, Charlotte. Karma.

  I’d still go out with her if she asked, though. Obviously.

  Balloonomania: The Original Mad Hatters

  2 MAY 1784: FRENCH BALLOONING BACKLASH

  Although balloons were still fashionably new and exciting to most, a backlash was already brewing. The French, never a nation to avoid an opportunity to become surly, rallied, perhaps over-exaggeratedly, against balloon traffic gridlock.

  This quickly built momentum, with stories blaming hot air balloons for causing wild fires that spread like, um, wild fire. Eventually the king became involved and threw his crown into the ring. King Louis XVI issued a royal proclamation in Paris on 2 May 1784. A subsequent official announcement appeared pinned to posts, and duplicated in most French newspapers the next day:

  Notice is given that His Majesty forbids the fabrication, or the sending up of any aeronautic machine under the pain of imprisonment. His Majesty strictly enjoining such persons as desirous of making any experiment of that nature, to apply him for permission. As he thinks proper. A decree of police, dated the 23rd April 1784 and published yesterday prohibits the conducting or raising of any balloon to which are hung lamps or spirits of wine, or any other combustible matter. The above ordinance also forbids the raising of any other balloon, without previous permission. The reasons for these prohibitions, are the dangers which are likely to follow from the falling of these machines upon thatched houses, haystacks or other inflammable materials. These precautions are not intended, however, to let this sublime discovery fall into neglect, but only that the experiments should be confined to the direction of intelligent persons.

  30 AUGUST 1784: BALLOONS AS PUBLIC TRANSPORTATION

  The presses were hot with Sadler’s achievements by the summer of 1784. A nation was quickly becoming obsessed with ballooning, and adopted Sadler as its British hero. And remember, this is an age devoid of celebrities; people were inevitably happier then - there was no Piers Morgan. And yet the newspaper letters pages were just as full of axe-grinding, moaning NIMBYS as they are today.

  A correspondent took the trouble of dipping into his ink well on 30 August 1784 to fulminate: “It is said the proprietors of large coaches are preparing a petition to prevent the use of Air Balloons as common vehicles of conveyance, and that the commissioners of turnpikes in general will join in the petition, praying that Balloon owners may be restricted from taking passengers, except to the Moon.”

  Like the later railways posing a threat to the canal system, feared as possible providers of agitation (the Duke of Wellington warned that railways would “cause the lower orders to move around” with the implication they would stoke revolution), balloons were seen by many as a potential revolutionary threat to traditional transport industries of coaching and shipping.

  15 SEPTEMBER 1784: SADLER’S RIVAL LUNARDI

  Balloonomania erupted in the UK after the flamboyant Italian Vincenzo (or Vincent) Lunardi moved to London to work for the Neapolitan Ambassador. Although Sadler was the first Englishman to fly - and was a genuine scientific engineer unlike the reckless, amateurish Italian showman - Lunardi can rightfully claim to be the first to ascend in Britain. He achieved this title at Moorfields, London, on 15 September 1784, a mere three weeks before Sadler. Nevertheless, Lunardi possessed a demonstratively showbusiness ethos compared to Sadler’s Renaissance Man image. There is a marker stone still standing at Standon Green End to commemorate Lunardi’s first landing near Ware, in Hertfordshire. (And don’t say “Ware?”, because that joke only works orally, not in print.) Lunardi had practically landed on the exact site of today’s South Mimms services - handy if he wanted to pay £9.80 for a post-flight tuna baguette.

  Lunardi’s prototype, complete with his oars (Library of Congress, Washington DC)

  The press enjoyed portraying Sadler and Lunardi as pitted rivals; the following poem from a 1785 newspaper typifies such delineation:

  Behold a windy competition,

  Two puff makers in opposition,

  The whole must end in vapour,

  By various means their puffs they utter,

  This uses water, flour and butter,

  And that pens, ink and paper.

  Notice how Sadler is reductively depicted as a pastry cook, whereas Lunardi is exposed as the manipulative penman. Lunardi’s alleged self-written account of his flight was dismissed by numerous sources, one batting away any attempts at the author’s legitimacy by remarking “anyone who has spoken to him for only a minute knows it cannot be his work.”

  Lunardi is considered to have made thirteen ascents, though it all went predictably wrong in 1786. Some say he was fortunate not to encounter disaster earlier. Taking off, Lunardi accidentally trapped a spectator in a guide rope. The unfortunate involuntary stowaway then plummeted to a messy death from an altitude of three hundred feet. The unlucky man was named as Ralph Heron, who inadvertently became the UK’s first aerial death.

  The Italian was sufficiently aware of the vast dangers he had been beckoning towards him (solo flights in a primitive valveless balloon) to record a last will and testament on the eve of each flight. Revealing that he was also the hedonistic showman, he decided key weight could be added to the balloon basket by including bottles of wine and brandy in order to toast his successful climb to the heavens - though he forgot to pack one equally crucial item: a corkscrew. Never one to give danger the respect it deserved, the reckless Lunardi merely snapped the neck of the glass bottle and glugged down its contents - and thus became the very first in a long tradition of pilots discovered to be drunk.

  Devoid of an accurate altimeter, reasonably on account of the fact one had not yet been invented, his mood settled on a seemingly ingenious way of charting his exact height. Clicking his stopwatch into action, he tossed the empty bottle over the edge. Calculating that it took four minutes to shatter on the earth, he surmised this meant he was at an altitude of four miles. No, I don’t know why either.

  What really cost him his reputation in the UK was the unexplained disappearance of a cat.
No matter what you achieve in the UK, forget how highly the British value their pets at your peril. Lunardi took a cat up with him during his ascent, and returned to the rocky ground of earth with quite a media bump - because there was no cat in his basket. Pressed to explain the balloon’s lack of feline content, he span a transparent and infelicitous mistruth about his decision to land the balloon to drop off the cat and then re-launch. As his primitive balloon possessed no valve to deflate the air pressure, this would have been almost impossible. Basically, Lunardi was vilified, his aeronautical achievements lining up in distinct second-place to moggy murder. Somewhat unfairly treated, Lunardi pressed ahead with future pet-free flights. This was akin to Neil Armstrong being the first man to walk on the moon, but only being remembered for once accidently stepping on a hamster.

  Aiding British ridicule was the undeniable fact that Lunardi was an egotistical womaniser, once declaring “I am Lunardi - who the women all love.” He was young, handsome and not only relished his own hype, but simultaneously both manufactured and believed it too. Brooches flipped open to reveal his portrait - always worn with several shirt buttons undone to expose his chest, very much of the puffed-up variety, and satisfyingly exposed for his swooning female adorers. These brooches had chart-topping sales figures during balloonomania. A garter belt, emblazoned with his portrait, also became a bestselling lingerie item. He caused women to fan themselves into knee-twisting faints, often hitting the floor hard in his presence, and when they raised a seemingly hapless arm for the Italian to pull them upwards they would often yank him forward where their open arms and heaving bosoms awaited the softest of landings. Lunardi wrote: “Women of this country are more difficult to resist with their coquetry, than Italian women. Many of them wish to accompany me.”