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By Root 185 0

her compatriots with an aspect of their heritage that had been deliberately denied them during the Communist era. When I asked why she was at the airport, she replied that she had come to meet a friend from Dubai, whose plane had been delayed and was now unlikely to land at Heathrow before mid-morning. An engineer of Lebanese origin, he had been coming to London once a month for the past year and a half in order to receive treatment for throat cancer at a private hospital in Marylebone, and during every visit, he invited her to spend the night with him in a Prestige Suite on the top floor of the Sofitel. She confided that she was registered with an agency which had a head office in Hayes and added, in a not unrelated aside, that Zygmunt Krasiński had conducted a three-year-long affair with the Countess Delfina Potocka, with whom Chopin had also been in love.

I returned to my room at three in the morning, struck by a sense of our race as a peculiar, combustible mixture of the beast and the angel. The first plane, due at Heathrow at dawn, was now somewhere over western Russia.

1 There used to be time to arrive. Incremental geographical changes would ease the inner transitions: desert would gradually give way to shrub, savannah to grassland. At the harbour, the camels would be unloaded, a room would be found overlooking the customs house, passage would be negotiated on a steamer. Flying fish would skim past the ship’s hull. The crew would play cards. The air would cool.

Now a traveller may be in Abuja on Tuesday and at the end of a satellite in the new terminal at Heathrow on Wednesday. Yesterday lunchtime, one had fried plantain in the Wuse District to the sound of an African cuckoo, whereas at eight this morning the captain is closing down the 777’s twin engines at a gate next to a branch of Costa Coffee.

Despite one’s exhaustion, one’s senses are fully awake, registering everything – the light, the signage, the floor polish, the skin tones, the metallic sounds, the advertisements – as sharply as if one were on drugs, or a newborn baby, or Tolstoy. Home all at once seems the strangest of destinations, its every detail relativised by the other lands one has visited. How peculiar this morning light looks against the memory of dawn in the Obudu hills, how unusual the recorded announcements sound after the wind in the High Atlas and how inexplicably English (in a way they will never know) the chat of the two female ground staff seems when one has the din of a street market in Lusaka still in one’s ears.

One wants never to give up this crystalline perspective. One wants to keep counterpoising home with what one knows of alternative realities, as they exist in Tunis or Hyderabad. One wants never to forget that nothing here is normal, that the streets are different in Wiesbaden and Luoyang, that this is just one of many possible worlds.

2 In the brief history of aviation, not many airports have managed to fulfil their visitors’ hopes for an architecture that might properly honour the act of arrival. Too few have followed the example set by Jerusalem’s elaborate Jaffa Gate, which once welcomed travellers who had completed the journey to the Holy City across the baked Shephelah plains and through the thief-infested Judean hills. But Terminal 5 wanted to have a go.

In the older terminals at Heathrow, it was a certain sort of carpet that one tended to notice first, swirling green, yellow, brown and orange, around which there hovered associations of vomit, pubs and hospitals. Here, by way of contrast, there were handsome grey composite tiles, bright corridors lined with glass panels in a calming celadon shade and bathrooms fitted out with gracious sanitary ware and full-length cubicle doors made of heavy timber.

The structure was proposing a new idea of Britain, a country that would be reconciled to technology, that would no longer be in thrall to its past, that would be democratic, tolerant, intelligent, playful and lacking in spite or irony. All this was a simplification, of course: twenty kilometres to the west and