A Week at the Airport (13 page)

8 It was time to start packing up. In the connecting corridor leading to the Sofitel, I was intercepted by a fellow employee of the airport who was conducting a survey of newly arrived passengers, gathering their impressions of the terminal, from the signage to the lighting, the eating to the passport stamping. The responses were calibrated on a scale of 0 to 5, and the results would be tabulated as part of an internal review commissioned by the chief executive of Heathrow. I questioned the unusually protracted nature of this interview only in so far as it made me think of how seldom market researchers, with access to influential authorities, ask us to reflect on any of the more troubling issues we face in life more generally. On a scale of 0 to 5, how are we enjoying our marriages? Feeling about our careers? Dealing with the idea of one day dying?

I ordered my last commercially sponsored club sandwich in the hotel lounge. The planes were particularly loud as they passed overhead – so loud that as one MEA Airbus took off for Beirut, the waiter shouted, ‘God help us!’ in a way that startled me and my sole fellow diner, a businessman from Bangladesh en route to Canada.

I worried that I might never have another reason to leave the house. I felt how hard it is for writers to look beyond domestic experience. I dreamt of other possible residencies in institutions central to modern life – banks, nuclear power stations, governments, old people’s homes – and of a kind of writing that could report on the world while still remaining irresponsible, subjective and a bit peculiar.

9 Just as passengers were concluding their journeys in the arrivals hall, above them, in departures, others were preparing to set off anew. BA138 from Mumbai was turning into BA295 to Chicago. Members of the crew were dispersing: the captain was driving to Hampshire, the chief purser was on a train to Bristol and the steward who had looked after the upper deck was already out of uniform (and humbled thereby, like a soldier without his regimental kit) and headed for a flat in Reading.

Travellers would soon start to forget their journeys. They would be back in the office, where they would have to compress a continent into a few sentences. They would have their first arguments with spouses and children. They would look at an English landscape and think nothing of it. They would forget the cicadas and the hopes they had conceived together on their last day in the Peloponnese.

But before long, they would start to grow curious once more about Dubrovnik and Prague, and regain their innocence with regard to the power of beaches and medieval streets. They would have fresh thoughts about renting a villa somewhere next year.

We forget everything: the books we read, the temples of Japan, the tombs of Luxor, the airline queues, our own foolishness. And so we gradually return to identifying happiness with elsewhere: twin rooms overlooking a harbour, a hilltop church boasting the remains of the Sicilian martyr St Agatha, a palm-fringed bungalow with complimentary evening buffet service. We recover an appetite for packing, hoping and screaming. We will need to go back and learn the important lessons of the airport all over again soon.