The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work - Alain De Botton [12]
Like someone running into an old friend in a strange land, I am surprised and a little moved when I stumble across a reel of bright-orange labels long familiar to me from my local supermarket. With the picture of the fishermen clubbing tuna to death burnt into my memory, I recognise that I am now a veteran of the blood-soaked processes lurking behind the labels’ serene photograph of a fishing jetty and an azure sea.
There being only so many efficient ways to cut through air or water, the architecture of the plane evokes aspects of the tuna. The Airbus has gill-like air-inlet flaps near its wheels and fins along its fuselage. Even the lower bodies of the two creatures are a comparable piscine grey. One crate is locked in place below rows 3 and 9 in business class, the other below rows 43 and 48 in economy. On the apron beside the London-bound Sri Lankan jet is a Qatar Airways cargo plane, its windows painted out, on its way around the world, bearing post, vegetables, documents and blood samples. The plane was in Tokyo last night and is due in Milan Malpensa tomorrow, one of thousands of freighters which, without any acknowledgement on our arrival and departure screens, pursue their lonely routes around the earth.
We take off at 8:30 a.m. and head northwest across the Indian Ocean. Outside, to the untrained and unaided eye, the plane appears to be adrift above an unsubstantial, vaporous blue mass, as featureless and disorienting as the sea but, reconfigured through the antennae of the flight-deck instruments (comparable in their abilities to the organic mechanisms embedded in the tuna’s cranium at the spot where the fisherman’s mallet fell), the sky is revealed as a lattice of well-marked lanes, intersections, laybys, junctions and beacon signals. The plane races along airway A418, which runs from the Gulf into southern Iran. Over the town of Shiraz, in a space known to pilots as intersection SYZ117.8, the captain moves across to airway R659, which leads to UMH113.5, a point thirty-five thousand feet above Uromiyeh, the capital of western Azerbaijan, where the Three Wise Men are said to have rested on their way to Bethlehem.
The cabin crew serve red chicken curry in Economy and a choice of asparagus vol-au-vent or cheese omelette in Business. The skies darken. Occasionally, one catches sight of the very moment when a light is extinguished in a house below. Someone has finished watching television in a living room in Craivoa, Romania, someone in Kalocsa, Hungary, has reached the end of an article in the fashion magazine Nok Lapja, neither of them suspecting the existence of an aluminium missile roaring through the firmament above them. I look at others’ faces and feel sympathy towards them. People stir under their synthetic blankets. If we lived still in the days of ocean liners, we might all be friends by the time we docked at Southampton.
The plane lands at Heathrow at nightfall. The tuna makes it to the warehouse by two in the morning, revealing nothing to a succession of men in high-visibility jackets about its tumultuous history of aquatic and airborne wandering. The drivers in the warehouse never know at the start of a shift where they may find themselves by dawn. At four in the morning, Ian Cook receives a command from the control room to drive one of the largest of the articulated lorries over to Bristol. The driver has been doing supermarket runs for the last fifteen years. He carries his belongings in a small red bag and has a complicated