Rory Sutherland Rory Sutherland

What I learned in a Qatari jail cell

Lesson one: start memorising important phone numbers

[Getty Images]

This column nearly didn’t appear. Another 24 hours and I would have trumped the late Jeffrey Bernard with the single sentence ‘Rory Sutherland is in prison.’ Having just spent a day in jail or police cells in Qatar for using an electronic cigarette on a plane, I thought I would just write one piece of technological advice for any Spectator readers who might find themselves in a similar situation.

Sit down today, take out your mobile phone, and memorise four or five important phone numbers. Better still, delete those few important numbers from your phone so you are forced to dial them from memory. Because when you’ve been arrested and your mobile phone is dead at 3 a.m., it is not the time to be wondering ‘Now was that 07786 or 07886?’

My children always get irritated when I nag them to charge their mobile phones. But as I try to explain, every few years we will find ourselves one phone-charge away from disaster. Tom Wolfe, who is a brilliant systems thinker, understood this fragility of life so well in The Bonfire of the Vanities. One misdialled phone call, one wrong turn on the freeway, a few tokes on an e-cig and you can find yourself, as I did, going from seat 1A to cell 3F in the space of an hour. It is the human equivalent of a phase transition.

I was treated, I think in retrospect, ridiculously harshly but not unfairly. The best of the police, in particular, were helpful, as far as a Kafkaesque bureaucracy allowed them to be. But my God it was terrifying at the time. Several of our fellow inmates had been imprisoned for bouncing a cheque. One, a Filipino, was imprisoned for having contact with a girl outside marriage.

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