A to B

I’ve been observing the Sahib of late. I had nagging feeling of déjà vu and couldn’t quite put my finger on it. Finally I’ve worked it out: he reminds me of someone else.

I used to have a colleague who thought he was far brighter than anyone else. Like rocket scientist bright. He wasn’t. Nor was his work rocket science, but he didn’t seem to think so and treated it as such. He was a Yorkshire man – not that that has anything to do with intellect, but….who knows! One of the irksome habits he had (and there were many) was that he never moved his upper lip when he spoke. In fact he never moved his lips very much when he spoke. Drove everyone nutzo, especially my esteemed American colleagues. Whenever anyone asked him a question about his work and he had to think of an answer he used to do the following: rub his eyes with the base of the palms of his hands, inhale deeply, exhale deeply and then put his head back and look at the ceiling, gurning slightly, deep in contemplation (of course) as if communing with a higher power. He would stay like that for a good couple of minutes before deigning to answer. Once a really brash American colleague bellowed at him “No point lookin’ up there - God ain’t gonna help you with this” I had to leave the room as I was laughing so hard.

So how does this relate to the Sahib? Well, the Sahib also likes to think he’s a bit of a rocket-scientist. He’s been working hard of late and telling everyone that he’s being doing some revolutionary analysis – the results of which will blow our minds away. There’s been a lot of melodrama. Huffing and puffing. Swearing and uttering of things like “eureka” (I shit you not). Obviously the cogs in his brain are working overtime. The revelatory analysis? Something along the lines of the fact that the Russian middle class is the same size as the British middle class, as percentage of the population as a whole. I’ll let you decide as to whether it’s akin to rocket science...or not.