A Week at the Airport - Alain De Botton [8]
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 Sunglass 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 impassively staring out the window, betraying no sign of emotion save for an unusual juddering movement of his left leg.
8 For many passengers, 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 titanic 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 advertisements 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 passengers 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