A Week at the Airport (8 page)

5 Just beyond the security area was a suite, named after an ill-fated supersonic jet and reserved for the use of first-class passengers. The advantages of wealth can sometimes be hard to see: expensive cars and wines, clothes and meals are nowadays rarely proportionately superior to their cheaper counterparts, due to the sophistication of modern processes of design and mass production. But in this sense, British Airways’ Concorde Room was an anomaly. It was humblingly and thought-provokingly nicer than anywhere else I had ever seen at an airport, and perhaps in my life.

There were leather armchairs, fireplaces, marble bathrooms, a spa, a restaurant, a concierge, a manicurist and a hairdresser. One waiter toured the lounge with plates of complimentary caviar, foie gras and smoked salmon, while a second made circuits with éclairs and strawberry tartlets.

‘For what purpose is all the toil and bustle of this world? What is the end of the pursuit of wealth, power and pre-eminence?’ asked Adam Smith in
The Theory of Moral Sentiments
(1759), going on to answer, ‘To be observed, to be attended to, to be taken notice of with sympathy, complacency, and approbation’ – a set of ambitions to which the creators of the Concorde Room had responded with stirring precision.

As I took a seat in the restaurant, I felt certain that whatever it had taken for humanity to arrive at this point had ultimately been worth it. The development of the combustion engine, the invention of the telephone, the Second World War, the introduction of real-time financial information on Reuters screens, the Bay of Pigs, the extinction of the slender-billed curlew – all of these things had, each in its own fashion, helped to pave the way for a disparate group of uniformly attractive individuals to silently mingle in a splendid room with a view of a runway in a cloud-bedecked corner of the Western world.

‘There is no document of culture that is not at the same time a document of barbarism,’ the literary critic Walter Benjamin had once famously written, but that sentiment no longer seemed to matter very much.

Still, I recognised the fragility of the achievement behind the lounge. I sensed how relatively few such halcyon days there might be left before members of the small fraternity ensconced in its armchairs came to grief and its gilded ceilings cracked into ruin. Perhaps it had felt a bit like this on the terraces of Hadrian’s villa outside Rome on autumn Sunday evenings in the second century AD, as a blood-red sun set over the marble colonnades. One might have had a similar presentiment of catastrophe,
looming in the form of the restless Germanic tribes lying in wait deep in the sombre pine forests of the Rhine Valley.

I started to feel sad about the fact that I might not be returning to the Concorde Room anytime soon. I realised, however, that the best way to attenuate my grief would be to nurture a thoroughgoing hatred of all those more regularly admitted into the premises. Over a plate of porcini mushrooms on a brioche base, I therefore tried out the idea that the lounge was really a hideout for a network of oligarchs who had won undeserved access through varieties of nepotism and skulduggery.

Regrettably, on closer examination, I was forced to concede that the evidence conflicted unhelpfully with this otherwise consoling thesis, for my fellow guests fitted none of the stereotypes of the rich. Indeed, they stood out chiefly on the basis of how
ordinary
they looked. These were not the chinless heirs to hectares of countryside but rather normal people who had figured out how to make the microchip and spreadsheet work on their behalf. Casually dressed, reading books by Malcolm Gladwell, they were an elite who had come into their wealth by dint of intelligence and stamina. They worked at Accenture fixing irregularities in supply chains or built income-ratio models at MIT; they had
started telecommunications companies or did astrophysical research at the Salk Institute. Our society is affluent in large part because its wealthiest citizens do not behave the way rich people are popularly supposed to. Simple plunder could never have built up this sort of lounge (globalised, diverse, rigorous, technologically-minded), but at best a few gilded pleasure palaces standing out in an otherwise feudal and backward landscape.

In the rarefied air that was pumped into the Concorde Room, there nonetheless hovered a hint of something troubling: the implicit suggestion that the three traditional airline classes represented nothing less than a tripartite division of society according to people’s genuine talents and virtues. Having abolished the caste systems of old and fought to ensure universal access to education and opportunity, it seemed that we might have built up a meritocracy that had introduced an element of true justice into the distribution of wealth as well as of poverty. In the modern era, destitution could therefore be regarded as not merely pitiable but
deserved
. The question of why, if one was in any way talented or adept, one was still unable to earn admittance to an elegant lounge was a conundrum for all
economy airline passengers to ponder in the privacy of their own minds as they perched on hard plastic chairs in the overcrowded and chaotic public waiting areas of the world’s airports.

The West once had a powerful and forgiving explanation for exclusion from any sort of lounge: for two thousand years Christianity rejected the notion, inherent in the modern meritocratic system, that virtue must inevitably usher in material success. Jesus was the highest man, the most blessed, and yet throughout his earthly life he was poor, thus by his very example ruling out any direct equation between righteousness and wealth. The Christian story emphasised that, however apparently equitable our educational and commercial infrastructures might seem, random factors and accidents would always conspire to wreck any neat alignment between the hierarchies of wealth on the one hand and virtue on the other. According to St Augustine, only God himself knew what each individual was worth, and He would not reveal that assessment before the time of the Last Judgement, to the sound of thunder and the trumpets of angels – a phantasmagorical scenario for non-believers, but helpful nevertheless in reminding us to refrain from judging others on the basis of a casual look at their tax returns.

The Christian story has neither died out nor been forgotten. That it continues even now to scratch away at meritocratic explanations of privilege was made clear to me when, after a copious lunch rounded off by a piece of chocolate cake with passionfruit sorbet, an employee called Reggie described for me the complicated set of circumstances that had brought her to the brutally decorated staff area of the Concorde Room from a shantytown outside Puerto Princesa in the Philippines. Our preference for the meritocratic versus the Christian belief system will in the end determine how we decide to interpret the relative standing of a tracksuited twenty-seven-year-old entrepreneur reading the
Wall Street Journal
by a stone-effect fireplace while waiting to board his flight to Seattle, against that of a Filipina cleaner whose job it is to tour the bathrooms of an airline’s first-class lounge, swabbing the shower cubicles of their diverse and ever-changing colonies of international bacteria.

6 Although the majority of its users regarded it as little more than a place where they had to spend a few hours on their way to somewhere else, for many others the terminal served as a permanent office, one that accommodated a thousand-strong bureaucracy across a series of floors off limits to the general public. The work done here was not well suited to those keen on seeing their own identities swiftly or flatteringly reflected back at them through their labour. The terminal had taken some twenty years and half a million people to build, and now that it was finally in operation, its business continued to proceed ponderously and only by committee. Layer upon layer of job titles (Operational Resource Planning Manager, Security Training and Standards Adviser, Senior HR Business Partner) gave an indication of the scale of the hierarchies that had to be consulted before a new computer screen could be acquired or a bench repositioned.

A few of the more obscure offices nonetheless managed to convey an impressive sense of the scope of the manpower and intelligence involved in getting planes around the world. The area housing British Airways’ Customer Experience Division was filled with prototypes of cabin seats, life jackets, vomit bags, mints and towelettes. An archivist oversaw a room filled with
rejected samples, most of which had ended up there on the grounds of cost, not so much because of the airline’s miserliness as because of its sheer size, an overspend on a single chair having dramatic consequences when typing out a purchase order for thirty thousand of them. A tour of the premises, with a close look at the early designs for plane interiors, offered a pleasure similar to that of looking through the first draft of a manuscript and seeing that prose that would eventually be polished and sure had started out hesitant and confused – a lesson with consoling applications for a universal range of maiden efforts.

I came away from the back rooms of the airport regretting what seemed a wrong-headed imbalance between the lavish attention paid to distracting and entertaining travellers and the scant time spent educating them about the labour involved in their journeys.

It is a good deal more interesting to find out how an airline meal is made than how it tastes – and a good deal more troubling. A mile from the terminal, in a windowless refrigerated factory owned by the Swiss company Gate Gourmet, eighty thousand breakfasts, lunches and dinners, all intended for ingestion within the following fifteen hours somewhere in the troposphere, were
being made up by a group of women from Bangladesh and the Baltic. Korean Airlines would be serving beef broth, JAL salmon teriyaki and Air France a chicken escalope on a bed of puréed carrots. Foods that would later be segregated according to airline and destination now mingled freely together, like passengers in the terminal, so that a tray containing a thousand plates of Dubai-bound Emirates hummus might be lined up in the freezer room next to four trolleys full of SAS gravadlax, set to fly part-way to Stockholm.

Aeroplane food stands at a point of maximum tension between the man-made and the natural, the technological and the organic. Even the most anaemic tomato (and the ones at Gate Gourmet were mesmerising in their fibrous pallor) remains a work of nature. How strange and terrifying, then, that we should take our fruit and vegetables up into the sky with us, when we used to sit more humbly at nature’s feet, hosting harvest festivals to honour the year’s wheat crop and sacrificing animals to ensure the continued fecundity of the earth.

There is no need for such prostration now. A batch of twenty thousand cutlets, which had once, if only briefly, been attached to lambs born and nursed on Welsh hillsides, was driven into the depot. Within hours, with the addition of a breadcrumb topping, a portion of these would metamorphose into meals that would be eaten over Nigeria – with no thought or thanks given to their author, twenty-six-year-old Ruta from Lithuania.