The movement of these flights then generates a whole knock-on effect which requires that amended instructions be issued to other planes in the neighbourhood.But the nuisance is something else. It happens quite regularly with flights, say, from Los Angeles to Madrid, which fly up along the Arctic Circle before swooping down in a south-easterly over Newfoundland. A visitor's guide book to the island, entitled (by a stroke of PR genius) Come Near At Your Peril, describes Gander as "young, modern and sophisticated", an impression that might be partly dispelled by a visit to the air-traffic controllers' favourite hang-out, the local curling club. A place, wrote E Annie Proulx in The Shipping News, "to scrob and claw through hard times". "On that screen right now you have something like 25,000 people But I shut that out of my mind It's like a surgeon: he operates on a brain, not a person I call them 'li'l airplanes', that's what I do 'Li'l airplanes.' And it works for me. They have an allotted number of planes whose flights they must track. Crann moves from screen to screen, peering over the controllers' shoulders.

His job is to have a clear vision of what all the planes are doing, to be alert to every contingency. In case of crisis, the buck stops with him.Faced with such a frightening degree of responsibility, the natural impulse of most people would be to flee But Crann's demeanour is steady and composed. As the consultant talked about these issues, Singh stared at him warily, his index finger flicking his bottom lip. That's why I've never given her a face in my in-store marketing campaigns.

I was vaguely expecting to be taken to some seedy caff, but Singh surprised me by guiding me into his cherry-red Roller. Kelly." He had a quick debate with her, then said we would go for lunch - a quick lunch, he added sternly. "Anyway, I was fighting with my parents and the careers office over my degree. They were saying: `You like politics, why don't you do a politics degree?' `Because I want to be a businessman.' `Why don't you do an accountancy degree?' `Because I want to be a businessman.' I wanted to do my own thing.' "Under duress, he applied for several of the business-related degrees on offer locally and got into the Manchester Metropolitan University to study Financial Services. His friends flocked to the shop and cleared it like locusts."The day I opened that store and answered the first phone call, and said, `Good morning, Miss Attitude Manchester', that was the ultimate," enthuses Singh, dropping for the first time his distant and preoccupied air.