A Week at the Airport - Alain De Botton [0]
A Week at the Airport
Alain de Botton is the author of three works of fiction and eight works of nonfiction, including How Proust Can Change Your Life, The Consolations of Philosophy, and The Art of Travel. He lives in London, where he founded The School of Life (www.theschooloflife.com).
www.alaindebotton.com
ALSO BY ALAIN DE BOTTON
Essays in Love
How Proust Can Change Your Life
The Consolations of Philosophy
The Art of Travel
Status Anxiety
The Architecture of Happiness
The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work
A VINTAGE INTERNATIONAL ORIGINAL, SEPTEMBER 2010
Copyright © 2009 by Alain de Botton
Photographs copyright © 2009 by Richard Baker
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York. Originally published in Great Britain by Profile Books Ltd, London, in 2009.
Vintage is a registered trademark and Vintage International and colophon are trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
De Botton, Alain.
A week at the airport / Alain de Botton ; photographs by
Richard Baker.
p. cm.
1. Heathrow Airport (London, England). 2. Airports—England—
London—Social aspects. I. Title.
HE9797.5.G72L625 2010
387.73609421—dc22
2010024511
eISBN: 978-0-307-74269-8
www.vintagebooks.com
v3.1
For Saul
Contents
Cover
About the Author
Other Books by This Author
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Chapter I Approach
Chapter II Departures
Chapter III Airside
Chapter IV Arrivals
Acknowledgements
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 Málaga (famed in the industry as much for its hot-headed labour relations as for its even-handed command of much of western Mediterranean airspace). 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 Białystok or drive our rental car to Cádiz): 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 passenger 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 passengers 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