The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work - Alain De Botton [72]
Because the fair was, at least in its first couple of days, tightly restricted to aerospace professionals and the press, it had an atmosphere of calm and easy conviviality, of the kind one might find between guests at a wedding. It was not uncommon to chat to people in the queue for bottled water or, above the sound of a G550 spy-plane pirouetting around the skies of the Ile-de-France, to strike up a conversation with a stranger eating a pain au chocolat on an adjoining seat, thereby opening one’s eyes to new horizons, for example, to the tenor of life as a colonel in the air force of Gabon.
The exhibition halls next to the runway had been divided up by country, which revealed national tempers as these were articulated in aircraft parts. The Swiss specialised in flight instruments, the Brazilians were pre-eminent in propellers and the Ukrainians were attempting, against many odds, to establish themselves in landing gears and metal alloys.
Although the goods on sale were uncommonly expensive, customers shopping for aircraft equipment were presumed not to be impervious to the techniques of the high street and hence to the appeal of a former Miss Sweden dressed in a catsuit, or the lure of a raffle for a free weekend at Euro Disney. At lunchtime, many companies cleared space on their stands to serve up food from their regions, in the hope that a prospective buyer who had decided against a mid-air refuelling tanker from Galicia might glance more favourably upon it in the wake of some slices of dry-cured ham. The representatives of a factory from the foot of the Urals had brought with them a large, linen-wrapped cheese which they carved with a penknife into small cubes, arranging them around the pedestal of a flag of the Russian Federation to inspire goodwill towards the enterprise’s chief offering: wheel braces for military cargo aircraft.
Pathos naturally gathered around some of the less frequented stands. It was evident that in no part of the aerospace industry could one be certain of escaping from ruinous competition. Even extreme specialisation – in anti-oxidation systems for wing flaps, for example – carried little guarantee of immunity from rival suitors. There seemed to be no item in the world that five alternative manufacturers had not already simultaneously embarked upon producing. Nevertheless, the bankrupt nature of a business was not always a sufficient argument against it. High up in the Saudi Arabian government, a decision had been taken to reserve a stand representing the nation’s aerospace industry, notwithstanding that no such thing could, in fairness, have been said actually to exist. Twice the size of a normal stall, the Saudi showcase boasted chandeliers, leather sofas and walls wrapped in a sandy felt evocative of the colours of the Taif Mountains. But because there was little for him to discuss, the manager mostly sat by himself, dressed in a maroon suit and tie, silently surveying a stainless-steel platter of dates. To have omitted to come to Paris would have been tantamount to admitting that Saudi Arabia did not build planes, hence that it was uninterested in technological innovation and had abandoned any claim to be counted among forward-looking nations. And yet to have attended, and in such style, only offered surreptitious confirmation of the very problem to which the stand had been proposed as the daring answer.
The displays manned by Russia and its sister