A Week at the Airport.

by Alain de Botton.

1 While punctuality lies at the heart of what we typically understand by a good trip, I have often longed for my plane to be delayed so that I might be forced to spend a bit more time at the airport. I have rarely shared this aspiration with other people, but in private I have hoped for a hydraulic leak from the undercarriage or a tempest off the Bay of Biscay, a bank of fog in Malpensa or a wildcat strike in the control tower in Malaga (famed in the industry as much for its hot-headed labour relations as for its even-handed command of much of western Mediterranean airs.p.a.ce). On occasion, I have even wished for a delay so severe that I would be offered a meal voucher or, more dramatically, a night at an airline's expense in a giant concrete Kleenex box with unopenable windows, corridors decorated with nostalgic images of propeller planes and foam pillows infused with the distant smells of kerosene.

In the summer of 2009, I received a call from a man who worked for a company that owned airports. It held the keys to Southampton, Aberdeen, Heathrow and Naples, and oversaw the retail operations at Boston Logan and Pittsburgh International. The corporation additionally controlled large pieces of the industrial infrastructure upon which European civilisation relies (yet which we as individuals seldom trouble ourselves about as we use the bathroom in Biaystok or drive our rental car to Cadiz): the waste company Cespa, the Polish construction group Budimex and the Spanish toll-road concern Autopista.My caller explained that his company had lately developed an interest in literature and had taken a decision to invite a writer to spend a week at its newest pa.s.senger hub, Terminal 5, situated between the two runways of London's largest airport. This artist, who was sonorously to be referred to as Heathrow's first writer-in-residence, would be asked to conduct an impressionistic survey of the premises and then, in full view of pa.s.sengers and staff, draw together material for a book at a specially positioned desk in the departures hall between zones D and E.It seemed astonishing and touching that in our distracted age, literature could have retained sufficient prestige to inspire a multinational enterprise, otherwise focused on the management of landing fees and effluents, to underwrite a venture invested with such elevated artistic ambitions. Nevertheless, as the man from the airport company put it to me over the telephone, with a lyricism as vague as it was beguiling, there were still many aspects of the world that perhaps only writers could be counted on to find the right words to express. A glossy marketing brochure, while in certain contexts a supremely effective instrument of communication, might not always convey the authenticity achievable by a single authorial voice or, as my friend suggested with greater concision, could more easily be dismissed as 'bulls.h.i.t'.

2 Though the worlds of commerce and art have frequently been unhappy bedfellows, each viewing the other with a mixture of paranoia and contempt, I felt it would be churlish of me to decline to investigate my caller's offer simply because his company administered airside food courts and hosted technologies likely to be involved in raising the planet's median air temperature. There were undoubtedly some skeletons in the airport company's closet, arising from its intermittent desire to pour cement over age-old villages and its skill in encouraging us to circ.u.mnavigate the globe on unnecessary journeys, laden with bags of Johnnie Walker and toy bears dressed up as guards of the British monarchy.

But with my own closet not entirely skeleton-free, I was in no position to judge. I understood that money acc.u.mulated on the battlefield or in the marketplace could fairly be redirected towards higher aesthetic ends. I thought of impatient ancient Greek statesmen who had once spent their war spoils building temples to Athena and ruthless Renaissance n.o.blemen who had blithely commissioned delicate frescoes in honour of spring.Besides, and more prosaically, technological changes seemed to be drawing a curtain on a long and blessed interlude in which writers had been able to survive by selling their works to a wider public, threatening a renewed condition of anxious dependence on the largesse of individual sponsors. Contemplating what it might mean to be employed by an airport, I looked with plaintive optimism to the example of the seventeenth-century philosopher Thomas Hobbes, who had thought nothing of writing his books while in the pay of the Earls of Devonshire, routinely placing florid declarations to them in his treatises and even accepting their gift of a small bedroom next to the vestibule of their home in Derbyshire, Hardwick Hall. 'I humbly offer my book to your Lordship,' England's subtlest political theorist had written to the swaggering William Devonshire on presenting him with De Cive De Cive in 1642. 'May G.o.d of Heaven crown you with many days in your earthly station, and many more in heavenly Jerusalem.' in 1642. 'May G.o.d of Heaven crown you with many days in your earthly station, and many more in heavenly Jerusalem.'In contrast, my own patron, Colin Matthews, the chief executive of BAA, the owner of Heathrow, was the most undemanding of employers. He made no requests whatever of me, not for a dedication, or even a modest reference to his prospects in the next world. His staff went so far as to give me explicit permission to be rude about the airport's activities. In such lack of constraints, I felt myself to be benefiting from a tradition wherein the wealthy merchant enters into a relationship with an artist fully prepared for him to behave like an outlaw; he does not expect good manners, he knows and is half delighted by the idea that the favoured baboon will smash his crockery. In such tolerance lies the ultimate proof of his power.

3 In any event, my new employer was legitimately proud of his terminal and understandably keen to find ways to sing of its beauty. The undulating gla.s.s and steel structure was the largest building in the land, forty metres tall and 400 long, the size of four football pitches, and yet the whole conveyed a sense of continuous lightness and ease, like an intelligent mind engaging effortlessly with complexity. The blinking of its ruby lights could be seen at dusk from Windsor Castle, the terminal's forms giving shape to the promises of modernity.

Standing before costly objects of technological beauty, we may be tempted to reject the possibility of awe, for fear that we could grow stupid through admiration. We may feel at risk of becoming overimpressed by architecture and engineering, of being dumbstruck by the Bombardier trains that progress driverlessly between satellites or by the General Electric GE90 engines that hang lightly off the composite wings of a Boeing 777 bound for Seoul.And yet to refuse to be awed at all might in the end be merely another kind of foolishness. In a world full of chaos and irregularity, the terminal seemed a worthy and intriguing refuge of elegance and logic. It was the imaginative centre of contemporary culture. Had one been asked to take a Martian to visit a single place that neatly captures the gamut of themes running through our civilisation from our faith in technology to our destruction of nature, from our interconnectedness to our romanticising of travel then it would have to be to the departures and arrivals halls that one would head. I ran out of reasons not to accept the airport's unusual offer to spend a little more time on its premises.

1 I arrived at the airport on a train from central London early on a Sunday evening, a small roller case in hand and no further destination for the week. I had been billeted at the Terminal 5 outpost of the Sofitel hotel chain, which, while not directly under the ownership of the airport, was situated only a few metres away from it, umbilically connected to the mothership by a sequence of covered walkways and a common architectural language featuring the repeated use of glazed surfaces, giant potted vegetation and grey tiling.

The hotel boasted 605 rooms that faced one another across an internal atrium, but it soon became evident that the true soul of the enterprise lay not so much in hostelry as in the management of a continuous run of conferences and congresses, held in forty-five meeting rooms, each one named after a different part of the world, and well equipped with data points and LAN facilities. At the end of this August Sunday, Avis Europe was in the Dubai Room and Liftex, the a.s.sociation of the British lift industry, in the Tokyo Hall. But the largest gathering was in the Athens Theatre, where delegates were winding up a meeting about valve sizes chaired by the International Organization for Standardization (or ISO), a body committed to eradicating incompatibilities between varieties of industrial equipment. So long as the Libyan government honoured its agreements, thanks to twenty years of work by the ISO, one would soon be able to travel across North Africa, from Agadir to El Gouna, without recourse to an adapter plug.

2 I had been a.s.signed a room at the top western corner of the building, from which I could see the side of the terminal and a sequence of red and white lights that marked the end of the northern runway. Every minute, despite the best attempts of the glazing contractors, I heard the roar of an ascending jet, as hundreds of pa.s.sengers, some perhaps holding their partners' hands, others sanguinely scanning The Economist The Economist, submitted themselves to a calculated defiance of our species' land-based origins. Behind each successful flight lay the coordinated efforts of hundreds of souls, from the manufacturers of airline amenity kits to the Honeywell engineers responsible for installing windshear-detection radars and collision-avoidance systems.

[image]The hotel room appeared to have taken its design cues from the business-cla.s.s cabin though it was hard to say for sure which had inspired which, whether the room was skilfully endeavouring to look like a cabin, or the cabin a room or whether they simply both shared in an unconscious spirit of their age, of the kind that had once ensured continuity between the lace trim on mid-eighteenth-century evening dresses and the iron detailing on the facades of Georgian town houses. The s.p.a.ce held out the promise that its occupant might summon up a film on the adjustable screen, fall asleep to the drone of the air-conditioning unit and wake up on the final descent to Chek Lap Kok.[image]My employer had ordered me to remain within the larger perimeter of the airport for the duration of my seven-day stay and had accordingly provided me with a selection of vouchers from the terminal's restaurants as well as authorisation to order two evening meals from the hotel.There can be few literary works in any language as poetic as a room-service menu.The autumn blast Blows along the stones On Mount AsamaEven these lines by Mats...o...b..sh, who brought the haiku form to its mature perfection in the Edo era in j.a.pan, seemed flat and unevocative next to the verse composed by the anonymous master at work somewhere within the Sofitel's catering operation:Delicate field greens with sun-dried cranberries,Poached pears, Gorgonzola cheeseAnd candied walnuts in a Zinfandel vinaigrette[image]I reflected on the difficulty faced by the kitchen of correctly interpreting the likelihood of selling some of the remoter items of the menu: how many out of the guests in the lift industry, for example, might be tempted by the 'Atlantic snapper, enhanced with lemon pepper seasoning atop a chunky mango relish', or by the always mysterious and somewhat melancholy-sounding 'Chef's soup of the day'. But perhaps, in the end, there was no particular science to the calibration of alimentary supplies, for it is rare to spend an evening in a hotel and order anything other than a club sandwich, which even Bash, at the peak of his powers, would have struggled to describe as convincingly as the menu's scribe:Warm grilled chicken slices,Smoked bacon, crisp lettuce,And a warm ciabatta roll on a bed of sea-salted fries[image]There was a knock at the door only twenty minutes after I had dialled nine and put in my order. It is a strange moment when two adult men meet each other, one naked save for a complimentary dressing gown, the other (newly arrived in England from the small Estonian town of Rakvere and sharing a room with four others in nearby Hillingdon) sporting a black and white uniform, with an ap.r.o.n and a name badge. It is difficult to think of the ritual as entirely unremarkable, to say in a casually impatient voice, 'By the television, please,' while pretending to rearrange papers though this capacity can be counted upon to evolve with more frequent attendance at global conferences.I had dinner with Chloe Cho, formerly with Channel NewsAsia but now working for CNBC in Singapore. She updated me on the regional markets and Samsung's quarterly forecast, but her sustained focus was on commodities. I wondered what Chloe's outside interests might be. She was like a sister of the Carmelite Order, behind whose austere headdress and concentrated expression one could just guess at occasional moments of doubt, rendered all the more intriguing by their emphatic denial. On a ticker tape running across the bottom of the screen, I spotted the share price of my employer, pointed on a downward trajectory.[image]After dinner, it was still warm and not yet quite dark outside. I would have liked to take a walk around one of the few fields that remained of the farmland on which the airport had been built some six decades before, but it seemed at once perilous and impossible to leave the building, so I decided to do a few circuits around the hotel corridors instead. Feeling disoriented and queasy, as if I were on a cruise ship in a swell, I repeatedly had to steady myself against the synthetic walls. Along my route, I pa.s.sed dozens of room-service trays much like my own, each one furtively pushed into the hallway and nearly all (once their stainless-steel covers were lifted) providing evidence of orgiastic episodes of consumption. Ketchup smeared across slices of toast and fried eggs dipped in vinaigrette spoke of the breaking of taboos just like the s.e.xual ones more often a.s.sumed to be breached during solitary residence in hotel rooms.I fell asleep at eleven, but woke up again abruptly just past three. The prehistoric part of the mind, trained to listen for and interpret every shriek in the trees, was still doing its work, latching on to the slamming of doors and the flushing of toilets in unknown precincts of the building. The hotel and terminal seemed like a giant machine poised in standby mode, emitting an uncanny hum from a phalanx of slowly rotating exhaust fans. I thought of the hotel's spa, its hot tubs perhaps still bubbling in the darkness. The sky was a chemical orange colour, observing the final hours of the fragile curfew it had been keeping ever since it had swallowed up the last of the previous evening's Asia-bound flights. Jutting from the side of the terminal was the disembodied tail of a British Airways A321, antic.i.p.ating another imminent odyssey in the merciless cold of the lower stratosphere.3 In the end it was a 5.30 a.m. arrival (BA flight from Hong Kong) that called a halt to my perturbed night. I showered, ate a fruit bar purchased from a dispensing machine in the car park and wandered over to an observation area next to the terminal. In the cloudless dawn, a sequence of planes, each visible as a single diamond, were lined up at different heights, like pupils in a school photo, on their final approach to the northern runway. Their wings unfolded themselves into elaborate and unlikely arrangements of irregularly sized steel-grey panels. Having avoided the earth for so long, wheels that had last touched ground in San Francisco or Mumbai hesitated and slowed almost to a standstill as they arched and prepared to greet the rubber-stained English tarmac with a burst of smoke that made manifest their planes' speed and weight.

[image]With the aggressive whistling of their engines, the airborne visitors appeared to be rebuking this domestic English morning for its somnolence, like a delivery person unable to resist pressing a little too insistently and vengefully on the doorbell of a still-slumbering household. All around them, the M4 corridor was waking up reluctantly. Kettles were being switched on in Reading, shirts being ironed in Slough and children unfurling themselves beneath their Thomas the Tank Engine duvets in Staines.Yet for the pa.s.sengers in the 747 now nearing the airfield, the day was already well advanced. Many would have awakened several hours before to see their plane crossing over Thurso at the northernmost tip of Scotland, nearly the end of the earth to those in London's suburbs, but their destination's very doorstep for travellers after a long night's journey over the Canadian icelands and a moonlit North Pole. Breakfast would have kept time with the airliner's progress down the spine of the kingdom: a struggle with a small box of cornflakes over Edinburgh, an omelette studded with red peppers and mushrooms near Newcastle, a stab at a peculiar-looking fruit yoghurt over the unknowing Yorkshire Dales.[image]For British Airways planes, the approach to Terminal 5 was a return to their home base, equivalent to the final run up the Plymouth Sound for their eighteenth-century naval predecessors. Having long been guests on foreign ap.r.o.ns, allotted awkward and remote slots at O'Hare or LAX, the odd ones out amid immodestly long rows of United and Delta aircraft, they now took their turn at having the superiority of numbers, lining up in perfect symmetry along the back of Satellite B.Sibling 747s that had only recently been separated out across the world were here parked wing tip to wing tip, Johannesburg next to Delhi, Sydney next to Phoenix. Repet.i.tion lent their fuselage designs a new beauty: the eye could follow a series of identical motifs down a fifteen-strong line of dolphin-like bodies, the resulting aesthetic effect only enhanced by the knowledge that each plane had cost some $250 million, and that what lay before one was therefore a symbol not just of the modern era's daunting technical intelligence but also of its prodigious and inconceivable wealth.As every plane took up its position at its a.s.signed gate, a ch.o.r.eographed dance began. A pa.s.senger walkway rolled forward and closed its rubber mouth in a hesitant kiss over the front left-hand door. A member of the ground staff tapped at the window, a colleague inside released the airlock and the two airline personnel exchanged the sort of casual greeting one might have expected between office workers returning to adjacent desks after lunch, rather than the encomium that would more fittingly have marked the end of an 11,000-kilometre journey from the other side of the globe. Then again, the welcome may be no more effusive a hundred years hence, when, at the close of a nine-month voyage, against the eerie blood-red midday light bathing a s.p.a.ceport in Mars's Cydonian hills, a fellow human knocks at the gold-tinted window of our just-docked craft.[image]Cargo handlers opened the holds to unload crates filled with the chilled flanks of Argentine cattle and the crenellated forms of crustaceans that had, just the day before, been marching heedlessly across Nantucket Sound. In only a few hours, the plane would be sent up into the sky once more. Fuel hoses were attached to its wings and the tanks replenished with Jet A-1 that would steadily be burned over the African savannah. In the already vacant front cabins, where it might cost the equivalent of a small car to spend the night reclining in an armchair, cleaners scrambled to pick up the financial weeklies, half-eaten chocolates and distorted foam earplugs left behind by the flight's complement of plutocrats and actors. Pa.s.sengers disembarked for whom this ordinary English morning would have a supernatural tinge.4 Meanwhile, at the drop-off point in front of the terminal, cars were pulling up in increasing numbers, rusty minicabs with tensely negotiated fares alongside muscular limousines from whose armoured doors men emerged crossly and swiftly into the executive channels.

Some of the trips starting here had been decided upon only in the previous few days, booked in response to a swiftly developing situation in the Munich or Milan office; others were the fruit of three years' painful antic.i.p.ation of a return to a village in northern Kashmir, with six dark-green suitcases filled with gifts for young relatives never previously met.The wealthy tended to carry the least luggage, for their rank and itineraries led them to subscribe to the much-published axiom that one can now buy anything anywhere. But they had perhaps never visited a television retailer in Accra or they might have looked more favourably upon a Ghanaian family's decision to import a Samsung PS50, a high-definition plasma machine the weight and size of a laden coffin. It had been acquired the day before at a branch of Comet in Harlow and was eagerly awaited in the Kissehman quarter of Accra, where its existence would stand as evidence of the extraordinary status of its importer, a thirty-eight-year-old dispatch driver from Epping.[image]Entry into the vast s.p.a.ce of the departures hall heralded the opportunity, characteristic in the transport nodes of the modern world, to observe people with discretion, to forget oneself in a sea of otherness and to let the imagination loose on the limitless supply of fragmentary stories provided by the eye and ear. The mighty steel bracing of the airport's ceiling recalled the scaffolding of the great nineteenth-century railway stations, and evoked the sense of awe suggested in paintings such as Monet's Gare Saint-Lazare Gare Saint-Lazare that must have been experienced by the first crowds to step inside these light-filled, iron-limbed halls pullulating with strangers, buildings that enabled a person to sense viscerally, rather than just grasp intellectually, the vastness and diversity of humanity. that must have been experienced by the first crowds to step inside these light-filled, iron-limbed halls pullulating with strangers, buildings that enabled a person to sense viscerally, rather than just grasp intellectually, the vastness and diversity of humanity.[image]The roof of the building weighed 18,000 tonnes, but the steel columns supporting it hardly suggested the pressures they were under. They were endowed with a subcategory of beauty we might refer to as elegance, present whenever architecture has the modesty not to draw attention to the difficulties it has surmounted. On top of their tapered necks, the columns balanced the 400-metre roof as if they were holding up a canopy made of linen, offering a metaphor for how we too might like to stand in relation to our burdens.Most pa.s.sengers were bound for a bank of automatic check-in machines in the centre of the hall. These represented an epochal shift away from the human hand and towards the robot, a transition as significant in the context of airline logistics as that from the washboard to the washing machine had once been in the domestic sphere. However, few users seemed capable of producing the precise line-up of cards and codes demanded by the computers, which responded to the slightest infraction with sudden and intemperate error messages making one long for a return of the surliest of humans, from whom there always remains at least a theoretical possibility of understanding and forgiveness.Nowhere was the airport's charm more concentrated than on the screens placed at intervals across the terminal which announced, in deliberately workmanlike fonts, the itineraries of aircraft about to take to the skies. These screens implied a feeling of infinite and immediate possibility: they suggested the ease with which we might impulsively approach a ticket desk and, within a few hours, embark for a country where the call to prayer rang out over shuttered whitewashed houses, where we understood nothing of the language and where no one knew our ident.i.ties. The lack of detail about the destinations served only to stir unfocused images of nostalgia and longing: Tel Aviv, Tripoli, St Petersburg, Miami, Muscat via Abu Dhabi, Algiers, Grand Cayman via Na.s.sau...all of these promises of alternative lives, to which we might appeal at moments of claustrophobia and stagnation.5 A few zones of the check-in area remained dedicated to traditionally staffed desks, where pa.s.sengers were from the start a.s.sured of interaction with a living being. The quality of this interaction was the responsibility of Diane Neville, who had worked for British Airways since leaving school fifteen years before and now oversaw a staff of some two hundred who dispensed boarding cards and affixed luggage labels.

It was never far from Diane's thoughts how vulnerable her airline was to its employees' bad moods. On reaching home, a pa.s.senger would remember nothing of the plane that had not crashed or the suitcase that had arrived within minutes of the carousel's starting if, upon politely asking for a window seat, she had been brusquely admonished to be happy with whatever she was a.s.signed this retort stemming from a sense on the part of a member of the check-in team (perhaps discouraged by a bad head cold or a disappointing evening at a nightclub) of the humiliating and unjust nature of existence.[image]In the earliest days of industry, it had been an easy enough matter to motivate a workforce, requiring only a single and basic tool: the whip. Workers could be struck hard and with impunity to encourage them to quarry stones or pull on their oars with greater enthusiasm. But the rules had had to be revised with the development of jobs by the early twenty-first century comprising the dominant sector of the market that could be successfully performed only if their protagonists were to a significant degree satisfied rather than resentfully obedient. Once it became evident that someone who was expected to wheel elderly pa.s.sengers around a terminal, for example, or to serve meals at high alt.i.tudes could not profitably be sullen or furious, the mental well-being of employees began to be a supreme object of commercial concern.Out of such requirements had been born the art of management, a set of practices designed to coax rather than simply extort commitment out of workers, and which, at British Airways, had inspired the use of regular motivational training seminars, gym access and free cafeterias in order to achieve that most calculated, unsentimental and fragile of goals: a friendly manner.[image]But however skilfully designed its incentive structure, the airline could in the end do very little to guarantee that its staff would actually add to their dealings with customers that almost imperceptible measure of goodwill which elevates service from mere efficiency to tangible warmth. Though one can inculcate competence, it is impossible to legislate for humanity. In other words, the airline's survival depended upon qualities that the company itself could not produce or control, and was not even, strictly speaking, paying for. The real origins of these qualities lay not in training courses or employee benefits but, for example, in the loving atmosphere that had reigned a quarter of a century earlier in a house in Cheshire, where two parents had brought up a future staff member with benevolence and humour all so that today, without any thanks being given to those parents (a category deserving to be generally known as the true Human Resources department of global capitalism), he would have both the will and the wherewithal to rea.s.sure an anxious student on her way to the gate to catch BA048 to Philadelphia.6 But even true friendliness was not always enough. I observed a pa.s.senger running with shoulder bags towards a check-in desk for a Tokyo flight, only to be courteously informed that he had arrived too late to board and would have to consider alternatives.

Yet his 747 had not already departed it would sit at the terminal for a further twenty minutes, its fuselage visible through the windows. The problem was a purely administrative one: the airline had stipulated that no pa.s.senger, even one awaited by a bride and two hundred guests, could be issued with a boarding card less than forty minutes before departure.The presence of the aircraft combined with its unreachability, the absence of another seat on a flight for forty-eight hours, the cancellation of a day of meetings in Tokyo, all these pushed the man to bang his fists on the counter and let out a scream so powerful that it could be heard as far away as the WH Smith outlet at the western end of the terminal.I was reminded of the Roman philosopher Seneca's treatise On Anger On Anger, written for the benefit of the Emperor Nero, and in particular of its thesis that the root cause of anger is hope. We are angry because we are overly optimistic, insufficiently prepared for the frustrations endemic to existence. A man who screams every time he loses his keys or is turned away at an airport is evincing a touching but recklessly naive belief in a world in which keys never go astray and our travel plans are invariably a.s.sured.Given Seneca's a.n.a.lysis, it was ominous to note the direction that the airline was taking in its advertising. It was promising ever more confidently to try its very best to serve, to please and to be punctual. As a result, in an industry as vulnerable to disaster as this one, there were surely many more screams to come.7 Not far from the incautiously hopeful man, a pair of lovers were parting. She must have been twenty-three, he a few years older. There was a copy of Haruki Murakami's Norwegian Wood Norwegian Wood in her bag. They both wore oversize sungla.s.ses and had come of age in the period between SARS and swine flu. It was the intensity of their kiss that first attracted my attention, but what had seemed like pa.s.sion from afar was revealed at closer range to be an unusual degree of devastation. She was shaking with sorrowful disbelief as he cradled her in his arms and stroked her wavy black hair, in which a clip shaped like a tulip had been fastened. Again and again, they looked into each other's eyes and every time, as though made newly aware of the catastrophe about to befall them, they would begin weeping once more. in her bag. They both wore oversize sungla.s.ses and had come of age in the period between SARS and swine flu. It was the intensity of their kiss that first attracted my attention, but what had seemed like pa.s.sion from afar was revealed at closer range to be an unusual degree of devastation. She was shaking with sorrowful disbelief as he cradled her in his arms and stroked her wavy black hair, in which a clip shaped like a tulip had been fastened. Again and again, they looked into each other's eyes and every time, as though made newly aware of the catastrophe about to befall them, they would begin weeping once more.

[image]Pa.s.sers-by evinced sympathy. It helped that the woman was extraordinarily beautiful. I missed her already. Her beauty would have been an important part of her ident.i.ty from at least the age of twelve and, in its honour, she would occasionally pause and briefly consider the effect of her condition on her audience before returning to her lover's chest, damp with her tears.We might have been ready to offer sympathy, but in actuality there were stronger reasons to want to congratulate her for having such a powerful motive to feel sad. We should have envied her for having located someone without whom she so firmly felt she could not survive, beyond the gate let alone in a bare student bedroom in a suburb of Rio. If she had been able to view her situation from a sufficient distance, she might have been able to recognise this as one of the high points in her life.[image]There seemed no end to the ritual. The pair would come close to the security zone, then break down again and retreat for another walk around the terminal. At one point, they went down to the arrivals hall and for a moment it looked as if they might go outside and join the queue at the taxi rank, but they were only buying a packet of dried mango slices from Marks and Spencer, which they fed to each other with pastoral innocence. Then quite suddenly, in the middle of an embrace by the Travelex desk, the beauty glanced down at her watch and, with all the self-control of Odysseus denying the Sirens, ran away from her tormentor down a corridor and into the security zone.My photographer and I divided forces. I followed her airside and watched her remain stoic until she reached the concourse, only to founder again at the window of Kurt Geiger. I finally lost her in a crowd of French exchange students near Sungla.s.s Hut. For his part, Richard pursued the man down to the train station, where the object of adoration boarded the express service for central London, claimed a seat and sat impa.s.sively staring out the window, betraying no sign of emotion save for an unusual juddering movement of his left leg.8 For many pa.s.sengers, the terminal was the starting point of short-haul business trips around Europe. They might have announced to their colleagues a few weeks before that they would be missing a few days in the office to fly to Rome, studiously feigning weariness at the prospect of making a journey to the wellspring of European culture albeit to its frayed edges in a business park near Fiumicino airport.

They would think of these colleagues as they crossed over the Matterhorn, its peak snow-capped even in summer. Just as breakfast was being served in the cabin, their co-workers would be coming into the office Megan with her carefully prepared lunch, Geoff with his varied ring tones, Simi with her permanent frown and all the while the travellers would be witnessing below them the byproducts of the t.i.tanic energies released by the collision of the Eurasian and African continental plates during the late Mesozoic era.What a relief it would be for the travellers not to have time to see anything at all of Rome's history or art. And yet how much they would notice nevertheless: the fascinating roadside advertis.e.m.e.nts for fruit juice on the way from the airport, the unusually delicate shoes worn by Italian men, the odd inflections in their hosts' broken English. What interesting new thoughts would occur to them in the Novotel, what inappropriate films they would watch late into the night and how heartily they would agree, upon their return, with the truism that the best way to see a foreign country is to go and work there.9 A full 70 per cent of the airport's departing pa.s.sengers were off on trips for pleasure. It was easy to spot them at this time of year, in their shorts and hats. David was a thirty-eight-year-old shipping broker, and his wife, Louise, a thirty-five-year-old full-time mother and ex-television producer. They lived in Barnes with their two children, Ben, aged three, and Millie, aged five. I found them towards the back of a check-in line for a four-hour flight to Athens. Their final destination was a villa with a pool at the Katafigi Bay resort, a fifty-minute drive away from the Greek capital in a Europcar Category C vehicle.

It would be difficult to overestimate how much time David had spent thinking about his holiday since he had first booked it, the previous January. He had checked the weather reports online every day. He had placed the link to the Dimitra Residence in his Favourites folder and regularly navigated to it, bringing up images of the limestone master bathroom and of the house at dusk, lit up against the rocky Mediterranean slopes. He had pictured himself playing with the children in the palm-lined garden and eating grilled fish and olives with Louise on the terrace.But although David had reflected at length on his stay in the Peloponnese, there were still many things that managed to surprise him at Terminal 5. He had omitted to recall the existence of the check-in line or to think of just how many people can be fitted into an Airbus A320. He had not focused on how long four hours can seem nor had he considered the improbability of all the members of a family achieving physical and psychological satisfaction at approximately the same time. He had not remembered how hurtful he always found it when Ben made it clear that he disproportionately favoured his mother or how he himself invariably responded to such rejections by becoming unproductively strict, which in turn upset his wife, who liked to voice her opinion that Ben's reticence was due primarily to the lack of paternal contact he had had since his father's promotion. David's work was a continuous flash-point in the couple's relationship and had in fact precipitated an argument only the night before, during which David had described Louise as ungrateful for failing to appreciate and honour the necessary connection between his absences and their affluence.[image][image]Had the plane on which they were to fly to Athens burst into flames shortly after take-off and begun plunging towards the Staines reservoir, David would have clasped the members of his family tightly to him and told them with wholehearted sincerity that he loved them unreservedly but right now, he could not look a single one of them in the eye.It seems that most of us could benefit from a brush with a near-fatal disaster to help us to recognise the important things that we are too defeated or embittered to recognise from day to day.As David lifted a suitcase on to the conveyor belt, he came to an unexpected and troubling realisation: that he was bringing himself himself with him on his holiday. Whatever the qualities of the Dimitra Residence, they were going to be critically undermined by the fact that with him on his holiday. Whatever the qualities of the Dimitra Residence, they were going to be critically undermined by the fact that he he would be in the villa as well. He had booked the trip in the expectation of being able to enjoy his children, his wife, the Mediterranean, some spanakopita and the Attic skies, but it was evident that he would be forced to apprehend all of these through the distorting filter of his own being, with its debilitating levels of fear, anxiety and wayward desire. would be in the villa as well. He had booked the trip in the expectation of being able to enjoy his children, his wife, the Mediterranean, some spanakopita and the Attic skies, but it was evident that he would be forced to apprehend all of these through the distorting filter of his own being, with its debilitating levels of fear, anxiety and wayward desire.[image]There was, of course, no official recourse available to him, whether for a.s.sistance or complaint. British Airways did, it was true, maintain a desk manned by some unusually personable employees and adorned with the message: 'We are here to help'. But the staff shied away from existential issues, seeming to restrict their insights to matters relating to the transit time to adjacent satellites and the location of the nearest toilets.Yet it was more than a little disingenuous for the airline to deny all knowledge of, and responsibility for, the metaphysical well-being of its customers. Like its many compet.i.tors, British Airways, with its fifty-five Boeing 747s and its thirty-seven Airbus A320s, existed in large part to encourage and enable people to go and sit in deckchairs and take up (and usually fail at) the momentous challenge of being content for a few days. The tense atmosphere now prevailing within David's family was a reminder of the rigid, unforgiving logic to which human moods are subject, and which we ignore at our peril when we see a picture of a beautiful house in a foreign country and imagine that happiness must inevitably accompany such magnificence. Our capacity to derive pleasure from aesthetic or material goods seems critically dependent on our first satisfying a more important range of emotional and psychological needs, among them those for understanding, compa.s.sion and respect. We cannot enjoy palm trees and azure pools if a relationship to which we are committed has abruptly revealed itself to be suffused with incomprehension and resentment.[image]There is a painful contrast between the enormous objective projects that we set in train, at incalculable financial and environmental cost the construction of terminals, of runways and of wide-bodied aircraft and the subjective psychological knots that undermine their use. How quickly all the advantages of technological civilisation are wiped out by a domestic squabble. At the beginning of human history, as we struggled to light fires and to chisel fallen trees into rudimentary canoes, who could have predicted that long after we had managed to send men to the moon and aeroplanes to Australasia, we would still have such trouble knowing how to tolerate ourselves, forgive our loved ones and apologise for our tantrums?10 My employer had made good on the promise of a proper desk. It turned out to be an ideal spot in which to do some work, for it rendered the idea of writing so unlikely as to make it possible again. Objectively good places to work rarely end up being so; in their faultlessness, quiet and well-equipped studies have a habit of rendering the fear of failure overwhelming. Original thoughts are like shy animals. We sometimes have to look the other way towards a busy street or terminal before they run out of their burrows.

The setting was certainly rich in distractions. Every few minutes, a voice (usually belonging to either Margaret or her colleague Juliet, speaking from a small room on the floor below) would make an announcement attempting, for example, to reunite a Mrs Barker, recently arrived from Frankfurt, with a stray piece of her hand luggage or reminding Mr Bashir of the pressing need for him to board his flight to Nairobi.As far as most pa.s.sengers were concerned, I was an airline employee and therefore a potentially useful source of information on where to find the customs desk or the cash machine. However, those who took the trouble to look at my name badge soon came to regard my desk as a confessional.One man came to tell me that he was embarking on what he wryly termed the holiday of a lifetime to Bali with his wife, who was just months away from succ.u.mbing to incurable brain cancer. She rested nearby, in a specially constructed wheelchair laden with complicated breathing apparatus. She was forty-nine years old and had been entirely healthy until the previous April, when she had gone to work on a Monday morning complaining of a slight headache. Another man explained that he had been visiting his wife and children in London, but that he had a second family in Los Angeles who knew nothing about the first. He had five children in all, and two mothers-in-law, yet his face bore none of the strains of his situation.Each new day brought such a density of stories that my sense of time was stretched. It seemed like weeks, though it was in fact just a couple of days, since I had met Ana D'Almeida and Sidonio Silva, both from Angola. Ana was headed for Houston, where she was studying business, and Sidonio for Aberdeen, where he was completing a PhD in mechanical engineering. We spent an hour together, during which they spoke in idealistic and melancholy ways of the state of their country. Two days later, Heathrow held no memories of them, but I felt their absence still.[image][image]There were some more permanent fixtures in the terminal. My closest a.s.sociate was Ana-Marie, who cleaned the section of the check-in area where my desk had been set up. She said she was eager to be included in my book and stopped by several times to chat with me about the possibility. But when I a.s.sured her that I would write something about her, a troubled look came over her face and she insisted that I would have to disguise her real name and features. The truth would disappoint too many of her friends and relatives back in Transylvania, she said, for as a young woman she had been the leading student in her conservatoire and since then was widely thought to have achieved renown abroad as a cla.s.sical singer.The presence of a writer occasionally raised expectations that something dramatic might be on the verge of occurring, the sort of thing one could read about in a novel. My explanation that I was merely looking around, and required nothing more extraordinary of the airport than that it continue to operate much as it did every other day of the year, was sometimes greeted with disappointment. But the writer's desk was at heart an open invitation to users of the terminal to begin studying their setting with a bit more imagination and attention, to give weight to the feelings that airports provoke, but which we are seldom able to sort through or elaborate upon in the anxiety of making our way to the gate.[image]My notebooks grew thick with anecdotes of loss, desire and expectation, snapshots of travellers' souls on their way to the skies though it was hard to dismiss a worry about what a modest and static thing a book would always be next to the chaotic, living ent.i.ty that was a terminal.

11 At moments when I could not make headway with my writing, I would go and chat to Dudley Masters, who was based on the floor below me and had spent thirty years cleaning shoes at the airport. His day began at 8.30 a.m. and, around sixty pairs later, finished at 9.00 p.m.

I admired the optimism with which Dudley confronted every new pair of shoes that paused at his station. Whatever their condition, he imagined the best for them, remedying their abuses with an armoury of brushes, waxes, creams and spray cleaners. He knew it was not evil that led people to go for eight months without applying even an all-purpose clear cream polish. He was like a kindly dentist who, on bringing down the ceiling-mounted halogen lamp and asking new patients to open their mouths ('Let's have a look in here, shall we?'), remains aware of how complicated lives can become and so how easily people may give up flossing their teeth while they try to save their companies or minister to a dying parent.[image]Though he was being paid to shine shoes, he knew that his real mission was psychological. He understood that people rarely have their shoes cleaned at random: they do so when they want to draw a line under the past, when they hope that an outer transformation may be a spur to an inner one. With no ill will, nor any desire to taunt me, he would daily a.s.sure me that if he ever got around to putting his experiences down on paper, his would be the most fascinating book about an airport that anyone had ever read.

12 Just past Dudley's workstation, off a corridor leading to the security zone, there was a multi-faith room, a cream-coloured s.p.a.ce holding an ill-matched a.s.sortment of furniture and a bookshelf of the sacred texts.

[image]I watched a family from southern India coming to pay their respects to Ganesh, the Hindu G.o.d in charge of the fortunes of travellers, before going on to board the 1.00 p.m. BA035 flight to Chennai. The deity was presented with some cupcakes and a rose-scented candle, which airport regulations prevented the family from actually lighting.In the old days, when aircraft routinely fell out of the sky because large and obvious components failed the fuel pumps gave out or the engines exploded it felt sensible to cast aside the claims of organised religions in favour of a trust in science. Rather than praying, the urgent task was to study the root causes of malfunctions and stamp out error through reason. But as aviation has become ever more subject to scrutiny, as every part has been hedged by backup systems, so, too, have the reasons for becoming superst.i.tious paradoxically increased.The sheer remoteness of a catastrophic event occurring invites us to forgo scientific a.s.surances in favour of a more humble stance towards the dangers which our feeble minds struggle to contain. While never going so far as to ignore maintenance schedules, we may nevertheless judge it far from unreasonable to take a few moments before a journey to fall to our knees and pray to the mysterious forces of fate to which all aircraft remain subject and which we might as well call Isis, G.o.d, Fortuna or Ganesh before going on to buy cigarettes and Chanel No.5 in the World Duty Free emporium on the other side of security.

1 The security line was impressive as always, numbering at least a hundred people reconciled, though with varying degrees of acceptance, to the idea of not doing very much else with the next twenty minutes of their lives.

[image]The station furthest to the left was staffed by Jim at the scanner, Nina at the manual bag check and Balanchandra at the metal detector. Each had submitted to an arduous year-long course, the essential purpose of which was to train them to look at every human being as though he or she might want to blow up an aircraft a thoroughgoing reversal of our more customary impulse to find common ground with new acquaintances. The team had been taught to overcome all prejudices as to what an enemy might look like: it could well be the six-year-old girl holding a carton of apple juice and her mother's hand or the frail grandmother flying to Zurich for a funeral. Suspects, guilty until proved innocent, would therefore need to be told in no uncertain terms to step aside from their belongings and stand straight up against the wall.Like thriller writers, the security staff were paid to imagine life as a little more eventful than it customarily manages to be. I felt sympathy for them in their need to remain alert at every moment of their careers, perpetually poised to react to the most remote of possibilities, of the sort that occurred globally in their line of work perhaps only once in a decade, and even then probably in Larnaca or Baku. They were like members of an evangelical sect living in a country devoid of biblical precedents Belgium, say, or New Zealand whose beliefs had inspired a daily expectation of a local return of the Messiah, a prospect not to be discounted even at 3.00 p.m. on a Wednesday in suburban Liege. How enviously the staff must have considered the lot of ordinary policemen and women, who, despite their often unsociable hours and wearying foot patrols, could at least look forward to having regular encounters with exactly the sorts of characters whom they had been trained to deal with.[image]I felt additional sympathy for the staff as a result of the limited curiosity they were permitted to bring to bear on the targets of their searches. Despite having free rein to look inside any pa.s.senger's make-up bag, diary or photo alb.u.m, they were allowed to investigate only evidence pointing to the presence of explosive devices or murder weapons. There was therefore no sanction for them to ask for whom a neatly wrapped package of underwear was intended, nor any official recognition of how tempting it might occasionally seem to stroke the back pockets of a pair of low-slung jeans without any desire to discover a semi-automatic pistol.[image]So great was the pressure imposed on the team by the need for vigilance that they were granted more frequent tea breaks than other employees. Every hour they would repair to a room fitted out with dispensing machines, frayed armchairs and pictures of the world's most-wanted terrorists, a series of angry-looking, prophet-like figures with long beards and inscrutable eyes, apparently holed up in mountain caves and reluctant ever to venture into Terminal 5.It was in this room that I spotted two women who looked as if they might be students enrolled in some sort of internship programme. When I smiled at them, hoping thereby to make them feel a bit more welcome, they came over to greet me and introduced themselves as the two most senior security officers in the building. In charge of training for the entire security staff at Terminal 5, Rachel and Simone regularly taught teams how to disarm terrorists and what positions to adopt in order to protect themselves in the event of a grenade being thrown. They also gave individual employees basic instruction in the use of semiautomatic weapons. Their close focus on anti-terrorism seemed to colour all aspects of their lives: in their spare time, they both read whatever literature they could find on the subject. Rachel was a specialist in the 1976 Entebbe operation, Simone a keen student of the Hindawi Affair, in which a Jordanian man, Nezar Hindawi, had given a Semtex-filled bag to his pregnant girlfriend and persuaded her to board an El Al plane for Tel Aviv. Though the plot had failed, Simone explained (unknowingly d.a.m.ning my naive conclusions on the wisdom of bothering to search certain sorts of pa.s.sengers), the incident had forever changed the way security personnel the world over would look at pregnant women, small children and kindly grandmothers.[image]If many pa.s.sengers became anxious or angry upon being questioned or searched, it was because such investigations could easily begin to feel, if only on a subconscious level, like accusations, and might thereby slot into pre-existing proclivities towards a sense of guilt.A long wait for a scanning machine can induce many of us to start asking ourselves if we have perhaps after all left home with an explosive device hidden in our case, or unwittingly submitted to a months-long terrorist training course. The psychoa.n.a.lyst Melanie Klein, in her Envy and Grat.i.tude Envy and Grat.i.tude (1963), traced this latent sense of guilt back to an intrinsic part of human nature, originating in our Oedipal desire to murder our same-s.e.x parent. So strong can the guilty feeling become in adulthood that it may provoke a compulsion to make false confessions to those in authority, or even to commit actual crimes as a means of gaining a measure of relief from an otherwise overwhelming impression of having done something wrong. (1963), traced this latent sense of guilt back to an intrinsic part of human nature, originating in our Oedipal desire to murder our same-s.e.x parent. So strong can the guilty feeling become in adulthood that it may provoke a compulsion to make false confessions to those in authority, or even to commit actual crimes as a means of gaining a measure of relief from an otherwise overwhelming impression of having done something wrong.Safe pa.s.sage through security did have one advantage, at least for those plagued (like the author) by a vague sense of their own culpability. A noiseless, unchecked progress through the detectors allowed one to advance into the rest of the terminal with a feeling akin to that one may experience on leaving church after confession or synagogue on the Day of Atonement, momentarily absolved and relieved of some of the burden of one's sins.2 There was a good deal of shopping to be done on the other side of security, where more than one hundred separate retail outlets vied for the attention of travellers a considerably greater number than were to be found in the average shopping centre. This statistic regularly caused critics to complain that Terminal 5 was more like a mall than an airport, though it was hard to determine what might be so wrong with this balance, what precise aspect of the building's essential aeronautical ident.i.ty had been violated or even what specific pleasure pa.s.sengers had been robbed of, given that we are inclined to visit malls even when they don't provide us with the additional pleasure of a gate to Johannesburg.

[image]At the entrance to the main shopping zone was a currency-exchange desk. Although we are routinely informed that we live in a vast and diverse world, we may do little more than nod distractedly at this idea until the moment comes when we find ourselves at the back of a bureau de change lined with a hundred safe-deposit boxes, some containing neat sheaves of Uruguayan pesos, Turkmenistani manats and Malawian kwachas. The trading desks of the City of London might perform their transactions with incomparable electronic speed, but patient physical contact with thick bundles of notes offered a very different sort of immediacy: a living sense of the miscellany of the human species. These notes, in every colour and font, were decorated with images of strongmen, dictators, founding fathers, banana trees and leprechauns. Many were worn and creased from heavy use. They had helped to pay for camels in Yemen or saddles in Peru, been stashed in the wallets of elderly barbers in Nepal or under the pillows of schoolboys in Moldova. A fraying fifty-kina note from Papua New Guinea (bird of paradise on the back, Prime Minister Michael Somare on the front) hardly hinted at the sequence of transactions (from fruit to shoes, guns to toys) that had culminated in its arrival at Heathrow.[image]Across the way from the exchange desk was the terminal's largest bookshop. Seemingly in spite of the author's defensive predictions about the commercial future of books (perhaps linked to the unavailability of any of his t.i.tles at any airport outlet), sales here were soaring. One could buy two volumes and get a third for free, or pick up four and be eligible for a fizzy drink. The death of literature had been exaggerated. Whereas on dating websites, those who like books are usually bracketed into a single category, the broad selections on offer at WH Smith spoke to the diversity of individuals' motives for reading. If there was a conclusion to be drawn from the number of bloodstained covers, however, it was that there was a powerful desire, in a wide cross-section of airline pa.s.sengers, to be terrified. High above the earth, they were looking to panic about being murdered, and thereby to forget their more mundane fears about the success of a conference in Salzburg or the challenges of having s.e.x for the first time with a new partner in Antigua.[image]I had a chat with a manager named Manishankar, who had been working at the shop since the terminal first opened. I explained with the excessive exposition of a man spending a lonely week at the airport that I was looking for the sort of books in which a genial voice expresses emotions that the reader has long felt but never before really understood; those that convey the secret, everyday things that society at large prefers to leave unsaid; those that make one feel somehow less alone and strange.Manishankar wondered if I might like a magazine instead. There was no shortage, including several with feature articles on how to look good after forty advice of course predicated on the a.s.sumption that one's appearance had been pleasing at thirty-nine (the writer's age).Nearby, another bookcase held an a.s.sortment of cla.s.sic novels, which had been imaginatively arranged, not by author or t.i.tle, but according to the country in which their narratives were set. Milan Kundera was being suggested as a guide to Prague, and Raymond Carver depended upon to reveal the hidden character of the small towns between Los Angeles and Santa Fe. Oscar Wilde once remarked that there had been less fog in London before James Whistler started to paint, and one wondered if the silence and sadness of isolated towns in the American West had not been similarly less apparent before Carver began to write.[image]Every skilful writer foregrounds notable aspects of experience, details that might otherwise be lost in the ma.s.s of data that continuously bathes our senses and in so doing prompts us to find and savour these in the world around us. Works of literature could be seen, in this context, as immensely subtle instruments by means of which travellers setting out from Heathrow might be urged to pay more careful attention to such things as the conformity and corruption of Cologne society (Heinrich Boll), the quiet eroticism of provincial Italy (Italo Svevo) or the melancholy of Tokyo's subways (Kenzabur e).

3 It was only after several days of frequenting the shops that I started to understand what those who objected to the dominance of consumerism at the airport might have been complaining about. The issue seemed to centre on an incongruity between shopping and flying, connected in some sense to the desire to maintain dignity in the face of death.

[image]Despite the many achievements of aeronautical engineers over the last few decades, the period before boarding an aircraft is still statistically more likely to be the prelude to a catastrophe than a quiet day in front of the television at home. It therefore tends to raise questions about how we might best spend the last moments before our disintegration, in what frame of mind we might wish to fall back down to earth and the extent to which we would like to meet eternity surrounded by an array of duty-free bags.Those who attacked the presence of the shops might in essence have been nudging us to prepare ourselves for the end. At the Blink beauty bar, I felt anew the relevance of the traditional religious call to seriousness voiced in Bach's Cantata 106:[image]Bestelle dein Haus, Denn du wirst Sterben, Und nicht lebendig bleiben.Set thy house in order, For thou shalt die, And not remain alive.Despite its seeming mundanity, the ritual of flying remains indelibly linked, even in secular times, to the momentous themes of existence and their refractions in the stories of the world's religions. We have heard about too many ascensions, too many voices from heaven, too many airborne angels and saints to ever be able to regard the business of flight from an entirely pedestrian perspective, as we might, say, the act of travelling by train. Notions of the divine, the eternal and the significant accompany us covertly on to our craft, haunting the reading aloud of the safety instructions, the weather announcements made by our captains and, most particularly, our lofty views of the gentle curvature of the earth.

4 It seemed appropriate that I should b.u.mp into two clergymen just outside a perfume outlet, which released the gentle, commingled smell of some eight thousand varieties of scent. The older of the pair, the Reverend St.u.r.dy, wore a high-visibility jacket with the words 'Airport Priest' printed on the back. In his late sixties, he had a vast and archetypically ecclesiastical beard and gold-rimmed spectacles. The cadence of his speech was impressively slow and deliberate, like that of a scholar unable to ignore, even for a moment, the nuances behind every statement, and accustomed to living in environments where these could be investigated to their furthest conclusions without fear of inconveniencing or delaying others. His colleague, Albert Kahn, likewise garbed for high visibility though his jacket, borrowed from another staff member, read merely 'Emergency Services' was in his early twenties and on a work placement at Heathrow while completing theological studies at Durham University.

'What do people tend to come to you to ask?' I enquired of the Reverend St.u.r.dy as we pa.s.sed by an outlet belonging to that perplexingly indefinable clothing brand Reiss. There was a long pause, during which a disembodied voice reminded us once more never to leave our luggage unattended.[image]'They come to me when they are lost,' the Reverend replied at last, emphasising the final word so that it seemed to reflect the spiritual confusion of mankind, a hapless race of beings described by St Augustine as 'pilgrims in the City of Earth until they can join the City of G.o.d'.'Yes, but what might they be feeling lost about about?''Oh,' said the Reverend with a sigh, 'they are almost always looking for the toilets.'Because it seemed a pity to end our discussion of metaphysical matters on such a note, I asked the two men to tell me how a traveller might most productively spend his or her last minutes before boarding and take-off. The Reverend was adamant: the task, he said, was to turn one's thoughts intently to G.o.d.'But what if one can't believe in him?' I pursued.The Reverend fell silent and looked away, as though this were not a polite question to ask of a priest. Happily, his colleague, weaned on a more liberal theology, delivered an equally succinct but more inclusive reply, to which my thoughts often returned in the days to come as I watched planes taxiing out to the runways: 'The thought of death should usher us towards whatever happens to matter most to us; it should lend us the courage to pursue the way of life we value in our hearts.'[image]5 Just beyond the security area was a suite, named after an ill-fated supersonic jet and reserved for the use of first-cla.s.s pa.s.sengers. The advantages of wealth can sometimes be hard to see: expensive cars and wines, clothes and meals are nowadays rarely proportionately superior to their cheaper counterparts, due to the sophistication of modern processes of design and ma.s.s production. But in this sense, British Airways' Concorde Room was an anomaly. It was humbli