I don’t know if any of my four disciples have ever flown Air Serbia.  I suspect not.  It tends to be an experience that is shared by retelling, perhaps as a means to afford healing, so I would have heard. The flight to Belgrade from Rome was with Air Italia; smooth, efficient, great service -just as you would expect from a major airline. It didn’t quite ready us for the next leg.

Linda and I were amongst the first commercial passengers to fly Belgrade to Zagreb as the route had only just been opened.  The last planes to navigate their way from Belgrade to Zagreb were Mig fighter jets and Serbian bombers.  In the war of the ’90s approximately 25% of the Zagreb economy and infrastructure was destroyed by Serbs and their allies.  The war only finished when Croatia launched the biggest ground offensive in Europe since the fall of Berlin and took back all its territory, thereby forcing an end to hostilities. Croatia launched itself into the EU, prosecuted most of its war criminals and zoomed ahead, Serbia sulked and stagnated.

The plane we were on predated that conflict.  People had carved graffiti into the wooden seats (Sjlobidan loves Krsnina I’m guessing.) The hostie told everyone to stack their baggage in the overhead lockers – this would have worked if your entire baggage consisted of just a wallet and a handkerchief.  She then suggested putting it under the seat in front of you as she had heard that was what some airlines allow.  No chance of anything fitting there.  “Can you squeeze it down near that space where you legs might just fit when there’s no luggage?”. Nope.  ‘Perhaps nurse it or leave it in the aisle,’ was her final suggestion.

She and the male purser didn’t have much time to organise the cabin as a fight had broken out behind us and they felt obliged to help sort it out.  The fight was made more vicious as it was between father and daughter.  They were screaming at each other over who got the aisle seat and who’d had to have luggage where their legs were meant to go.

I could sense the male purser’s frustration.  He’d done everything needed to make it into the airline business as part of the cabin crew on an international airline.  He could speak a number of languages including English.  He’d done well at school and done well at the training college. He took enormous care with his uniform, always having matching accessories. And he cared deeply about his bodily hygiene.   Despite all this he ends up on Air Serbia flying back and forth between Belgrade and Zageb on a plane that should have lost its airworthiness certificate in 1979. In his heart of hearts he knew his Mother was right.  There is no future in air travel in Serbia,  a young man is better off becoming a bus driver.  Or a pig farmer like his father.

As my friend Remmington would say – ‘Life can be funny like that sometimes’

Better let you go Farquar
Ross of the Balkans