The Word Cloud

This is a bit naughty, but what the hell

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Over the years I have been rather lucky, professionally speaking. One particular programme I ran allows me to lay a legitimate claim to being a rocket scientist. I have used this to try to impress women at parties with varied, but as yet not totally acceptable, degrees of success ever since. I was in charge of the development of a system to track the European Space Agency Rocket and blow it up if it becomes dangerously off course. Anyway, here I am trying to impress the ladies again. (Is it working?). In fact it was used in anger once and $450M of rocket and payload scattered all over the jungle.

The launch base for the European Space Agency is in fact in French Guyana in South America. It was, of course, necessary to go there from time to time. There were two choices of route in those days. You could take a flight to Florida, change planes and fly down in one continuing run. Or you could fly to Martinique, stay overnight and get a shortish hop the next day. Now, even though I was the boss I had to hesitate over that one. But it turns out that the travel agents I was buying all the tickets for the whole team as we shuttled between Toulouse (what a dump) and London were shareholders in Club Med and provided I bought the tickets from them they would throw in a few rooms at the Club Med in Martinique "on the changeover". There is always a bit of unused capacity and we only needed one night. So, what the hell. Four of us, sorted.

So two things:

Who remembers Viz? The English accent always had an acceptable effect on American young ladies and there were a lot of them at the Club Med in Martinique. Bushy and Jurassic (aka Phil and John) were a big success. Of course as the boss I had to set an example. Never been totally sure about Alistair, as it happens. After an evening of plentiful wine and food we reconvened the next day to observe the young ladies with whom my erstwhile colleagues had become acquainted doing the morning biometric exercise. We also observed that the instructor, having explained it was for reasons of assessment, was inspecting the bottoms of all of the young ladies as they did their "buns tensing" stretches. I thought that the bottom inspectors was an invention for Viz. Bless them, the girls later said he had explained it was necessary as he didn’t want to cause them to pull any muscles.

Later, sitting on the beach on a dead tree, with Jurassic opposite on a rock, he had a serious moment and started discussing Kauffman algorithms. Which is the second thing. It’s all about trajectories and was something we needed to have our heads around for the meeting next day. Just behind him and rather quietly this truly gorgeous young woman laid out her towel and stood looking to to sea. John just carried on, unaware that his three colleagues had gone totally, rigidly, silent and at least one was silently praying to whichever of the gods governed bikini straps. It must have worked because after a moment the top came off and rather appropriately for a team off to progress a space project, these gravity defying beautiful parts were revealed.

John said, eventually:- "What?" and we fell about laughing.

Later that day we joined our exhausted French direct routed colleagues for dinner at the base in much better shape than they were. Happy days.