Somehow they all got through the next day, despite the little sleep that most of them had been able to snatch, though the exhibition had been even more hallucinatory in these circumstances. Then it was back to the reality of the magazine. For the third issue Bernice had decided to use some of the experiences of the show to focus on business exhibitions in general. Her own editorial was called Making Exhibitions of Ourselves, and Dave was writing a piece looking at the dynamics of these strange events. Otherwise the other major feature was Technology in the Office which Yasmeen had soon produced, and Pete's piece on Working from Home, held over from the last issue. He was now back in the office, but Bernice could see his mind was still elsewhere.
To George, who had turned in an acceptable article on Moving Offices, she had given the subject of Plants, and to Chris Marriage and Business - as he said, he was began to feel like the magazine's agony aunt. The case studies this month were being written by Chris and Yasmeen. One innovation that had been agreed at the review meeting of the November issue after the exhibition was that the covers would be changed: henceforth rather than the glamorous but rather abstract images used there would be one main shot of an office, concentrating on the people in it. The various coverlines would then appear down each side. In other words, the kind of approach used to great effect by Cosmopolitan, in Bernice's opinion one of the most successful magazines in its use of consistent, simple but striking covers. She regretted the fact that they would not be able to borrow Cosmo's other effective cover technique: using the word 'sex' every other line.
At the end of the copy cycle for December, and before January inexorably began, Yasmeen was due to take her first foreign press trip. Although she would have thought it unprofessional to admit it, she had been quite anxious to go on one. To be sure, she had attended numerous UK press conferences, some in quite glamorous settings - tops of high buildings, stately homes, river boats, sea-going yachts etc - but the romance of foreign travel was something that she had long hankered after.
And so it was good fortune that a company specialising in the manufacture of office carpets had written to The Business inviting it to send someone to "a launch whose ramifications will reach out and touch the whole of British business, a product whose need has long been felt a grass-root level, as manifest by the groundswell of opinion there." Clearly something too good to miss...especially since the launch was taking place in Istanbul. Although there was a certain logic to this, it was more in the minds of the PR company organising the trip than in reality: all the manufacturing of the carpets was carried out in Wigan, and there was nothing remotely Turkish about anything in the company. Quite rightly, though, the PR company guessed that relatively few general journalists and not many specialists would be interested in taking the train up to Wigan to talk about carpets; but offered the chance to be flown to Istanbul to do the same, few would refuse.
Just to make sure that the trip would require the minimum of effort, the PR company even arranged for a taxi to pick up the relevant journalists and to take them to Heathrow. As was required by the unwritten laws of the office hierarchy, Bernice offered the trip first to Pete, as her number two. He of course was unable to go, unwilling to be out of the country while his wife was still poorly. It thus fell to Yasmeen, who with excitement prepared her overnight bag and waited in her digs for the taxi to appear at the appointed hour.
It was not a black London taxi, but an ordinary family saloon working for one of the numerous private taxi companies that were springing up. Ever one to make the most a situation, Yasmeen asked the driver as they drove off why there was such a boom.
"Well, love," he replied as his radio chortled incomprehensibly in the background, "it's all this money that's floating around. Everybody feels like a lord, wants to be driven everywhere. Companies are flush, nothing's too good for their people, and so you get blokes like me filling the need. But I know it won't last, that's why I'm learning the Knowledge - going official if you like."
"Yes, I've heard of that," said Yasmeen. "What exactly does it entail?"
"Well," explained the driver, "to drive a London cab, you've got to know pretty well every road in the capital - and some outside. To prove you know 'em, you take a kind of test. This requires The Knowledge, having off by hearts certain set routes from A to B. You know all those geezers on their little mopeds with a clipboard fixed to the handlebars" - yes, she had seen them around London - "that's us, learning The Knowledge, the only way you can - on the road. What about yourself? What do you do - off to some exotic parts?"
She explained she was a journalist on a working trip abroad. Well, that's what the invite said.
"Where to?" he persisted.
"Turkey," she said, always respecting a good journalistic technique.
"Turkey," said the man, "now there's an interesting place."
She rather expected him to go on about Turkish delight or some of the holiday resorts on the coast. She did him an injustice.
"What with all this business in Russia, Turkey's gonna be quite an interesting place in a few year's time. Why? Well, think about it: you've got all the Turkic republics - Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Azerbaijan, Kyrgyzstan - that are going to start loosening the embrace of that old Soviet Bear. And where they gonna look? OK, as Islamic countries it could be Iran, keen on exporting the Islamic revolution, but there you've got the problem of the Arabic script - no good at all for Turkic languages - that's why the Turks themselves ditched Arabic and went for the Roman alphabet. So, stands to reason that these republics will start turning towards Turkey, which is bound to become one of the main powers in the region."
Amazing, thought Yasmeen, conscious of her own complete ignorance in these matters. She would have to check with Mowley when she got back to see what he thought - she regarded him as something of a touchstone in these matters. After this exposition the cab driver had fallen silent, perhaps busily trying to untangle the situation of the two Koreas, or maybe forbidden by the vows of taxi freemasonry to pass on more than one revelation at a time to the uninitiated. Yasmeen could sit back and start to think about her trip.
It was rather ironic that one whose origins were so distant - not only was she raised in India, but she gathered from the nudges and winks of her uncle that she was actually conceived on a houseboat in Srinagar in Kashmir, nearly in those same Turkic regions the cab driver had been considering - had travelled so little. She had never been abroad from England after moving there, and so the prospect of travelling out to Turkey, even if only for two days, filled her with a thousand and one expectations. She also longed for her pristine passport to receive its first, validating stamp: after all, what was the point of a passport and its blank pages if there was nothing on them?
Partly inspired by the tales she had heard of India, told by her parents and her uncle, she wove around the word Istanbul - or Stamboul as she liked to think of it - rich scenes full of exotic wonder. She was young, so the otherness of abroad represented no threat to her, but instead was a symptom of its potential for new experiences, something that she was beginning to crave.
Even Heathrow airport, hardly among the world's most glamorous, excited her. The thought of all those thousands of people coming from and going to the furthest corners of the earth, the huge chunks steel landing and taking off (every two minutes, had she read somewhere, making it the busiest international airport in the world?) seemed to broaden her horizons at a stroke.
As she walked through the security and passport controls - blissfully oblivious of the fact that the officer scrutinised her new passport rather more carefully than he did for the other, paler Brits around her in the press group - she was suddenly filled with a renewed sense of gratitude towards Bernice for making all this possible, for giving her a helping hand on to the next rung of the ladder, the next stage of her career. She wondered vaguely where she was going now in her career, what the next important markers would be. But for the moment she was content to drink in the new and exotic sights around her. And this was while she was still in Heathrow's departure lounge.
