A pricey hotline

A feature of air travel is that it allows you at best to make new friends, or at worst an enemy or two.

Occasionally, of course, one can manage an entire ten-hour flight without saying a word to your fellow passenger, but that’s highly unlikely because the mere clashing of elbows on that tiny armrest will inevitably break the ice with: “I’m terribly sorry…no it really was my fault…no, I insist you use the armrest… really, I always sit with my arms folded under my chin while I turn the pages of my book with my knees…well, that’s kind of you thanks very much, yes I am going to Frankfurt as well…so you’re in the gas reticulation business, how interesting…five children, wow… no, I must confess I have never fished for bass with a pillowcase and a dead chicken” — and so on, until you know each other like lifelong bosom buddies.

Apart from a 275kg Congolese woman who sat next to me all the way from Paris to Kinshasa clutching two live chickens to her ample bosom while bemoaning the decline of the Congolese franc and the state of the economy in francophone Africa, the most fascinating person I’ve ever met on a plane was a fellow journalist called Oswieki from Warsaw.

He decided to hitchhike around Europe in the late 1990s and his first port of call was Rome and Vatican City.

As luck would have it, when he mentioned his nationality to the papal press office he was granted a rare interview with the pope, who of course was one of the world’s best-known Poles.

Chatting away to the pontiff in his spartan office, he was struck by the grandeur of the telephone. It was a huge ornate gold instrument which stood out like a beacon in the dim surroundings.

The pope saw him admiring it and proudly told him that it was his “hotline to God”.

Oswieki shook his head in disbelief, so the pope suggested he pick it up and prove it to himself. Sure enough, he got straight through to God, and after a chat of about three or four minutes he hung up, his mouth agape and his eyes as wide as saucers.

His mind whirled as he formulated the article he would eventually write and with which he would hold Time magazine to ransom for a fee so big he would be able to retire to the Bahamas for a life of luxury and much vaunted western-style debauchery.

He was so taken aback, he couldn’t remember the rest of the interview; all he was aware of was leaving the Vatican only to be collared by the pope’s equerry who handed him a phone bill for the equivalent of about R5000 while at the same time warning him that if he’d ever write a story about his experience, lightening would strike him stone dead.

Poor Oswieki. It wiped out his life’s savings and his dreams of debauchery in one fell swoop. He had to wash dishes in a dingy spaghetteria in the backstreets of Fiumicino for two months to save up enough to continue his travels.

Five months later found Oswieki just south of Kerry in Ireland, traipsing through the rain looking for a bus-shelter or anywhere dry to spend the night.

As he passed a tiny church, the parish priest, hurrying home from a quick post-funeral Bushmills at the local pub, took pity on the weary traveller and invited him into the tiny presbytery to share another slug of whiskey to warm him up.

Oswieki couldn’t believe his eyes, because there on a rough-hewn deal table in the sparse little room was that same, huge, ornate telephone.

He gagged as the Bushmills coursed its way down his throat, and asked if that great telephone was perhaps a hotline to God.

“Sure and begorrah it is, my son,” said the priest. “Would ye be after having a little talk to the Almighty by any chance?”

Oswieki spluttered the Polish equivalent of “not on your Nelly” and explained to the somewhat perplexed padre that while he would dearly love to have a chat to God, he just didn’t happen to have the equivalent of R5000 on him.

“What are you blathering on about, you silly Polish git,” said the priest. “It’ll cost you only 35 pence for the call.”

“But when I used the pope’s phone, it cost me a fortune,” argued Oswieki.

“Well now, me boy,” said the priest. “This isn’t Rome; this is Ireland…it’s a local call from here, you see.”