Siezing the opportunities in life

Close proximity to greatness, or at least to highness does not come to everyone.

I shared a lift journey, a rather slow large goods lift, with Ken Livingstone and a few others in his last days fighting a rear-guard action before County Hall was un-moored from the South Bank, and in March 1986 left to drift down the Thames to oblivion. I was one of a small army of volunteers to help “Save the GLC”. We were offered good overtime pay for after hours work.

Here was a political figure very engaged, and in the public eye. I was much struck by the obvious fact that to be in the presence of this small politician and Leader of the Greater London Council, was to feel the inverse of being overwhelmed by the personality and aura of the traditional politician or people’s representative.

Here was a man who did not need to waste his energies projecting himself. His silent presence drew those around him into his sphere of action with his steely magnetism. Understand this is my subjective impression. I had felt the same lack of deliberate energetic radiation, when I met the good-natured Bishops of Arundel and Southwark by chance at the top of Arundel High Street in 1971.

My story carries on 24 years later. I attended the World Energy Congress for my publishing company’s trade exhibition stand in Tokyo in October 1995.

The day before the grand opening ceremony, in the wide corridors of the exhibition centre, I chanced on a small excited tightly-knit crowd. Drawn towards this, I asked a rather wild-haired gentleman what was happening. This loud, wild man, looked like a younger version of the fictional film character Dersu Uzula. He said he was a Russian photo journalist. He explained his journo colleagues, press, radio and TV, from all over the world hoped to pick a numbered cloakroom ticket out of a hat for the privilege of seeing the Emperor and Empress arrive to open the World Energy Congress the next morning.

He really took to me, and made much of me I thought, and he put a large muscular arm on my shoulders to encourage me to go take one of the cherished tickets. Might it have been that he saw in me an opportunity to improve his own ballot chances? I may be a bit of a soppy date, but I knew he knew I’d gladly give him my winning ticket. I unfolded my numbered ticket. It was Number One! My Russian was cock-a-hoop, and he congratulated me. Then he opened his ticket numbered below twenty as well.

The next morning, in the buzz before the opening ceremony, the Tannoy announced for those ballot ticket holder journalists to make their way as fast as possible down the congress hall auditorium and to follow the secret service agents to the outside entrance.

I remember my Russian friend’s firm grip on my arm as he grabbed me and we all but jogged till we were outside, my camera case banging on my chest.

We jostled rudely for a prime position on the scaffolding erected in three tiered rows on either side of a minor street entrance.

I was not quite so quick, and got a view obstructed by a pillar. But I was quite content with the position. We were to wait for a very long time with a view of an asphalted area totally cleared of people. The light for photography was good. You could just catch sight of crowds held behind barriers some 400 metres away. No searches were carried out at all and nobody questioned us. Ah, those were days of pure innocence and trust.

I was now standing there, acutely conscious of my late father, who, over twenty years previously, had attended an international conference in Tokyo as a French simultaneous interpreter.

Wherever in the four populated continents my father found himself, he would change after work, hire a motor scooter, and go explore as far as he could go to see, photograph and meet everything and everyone he came across. This was his way of living life fully. With my Dad as a rôle model, I adopted his non-conformist adventure seeking methods during my own nine years tenure in B2B travelling sales, from 1992.

On one occasion, he was a bit lost, stumped by the impossibility of reading the road signs or place names in Japanese. So in the hope of getting to a town, he followed a road running alongside a railway line, a good scouting or tracker tactic.

It was a hot day. He was quite alone in the stillness of the countryside.

He waited at a level crossing for a train to pass. It came by awfully slowly. Standing up quite still, arm raised in motionless greeting at a window, in formal clothes, stood His Majesty Emperor Hirohito of Japan, and at his side, his wife, the Empress Kōjun.

This was a cortège in transit on a state visit. To show his respect for his own people, the Emperor stood there on show, ready for all to see and pay homage.

This beautiful image of devotion to service has stayed with me the way my father told it.

The line of black limos began rolling up in front of our entrance. Cameras cocked, TV apparatus swivelled and readied. Lots of security people tumbled out of some of the first black cars.

Then the Empress Michiko stepped out on my nearside. I started photographing. Then the Emperor Akihito of Japan got out on the far side from me. With dignity, bras-dessus, bras-dessous, they walked in formal western dress in front of me, as near as I am to you now.

I have no record of this whatsoever, though my battery power was full. I had used up the last three shots on my film roll of 36 on partial views of the Empress with a pillar in soft focus.

The only thing that matters to me today is the pride and joy my father would have felt, had he been alive, to listen to my little adventure, so deeply in the vein of his own eccentric escapades.

I owe so much to your example, Dad, of siezing the opportunities in life!