A Week at the Airport Read online

  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.

  Acknowledgements

  With many thanks to the following. At Mischief, Dan Glover (who had the idea), Charlotte Hutley and Seb Dilleyston. At BAA, Colin Matthews, Cat Jordan, Claire Lovelady and the Communications team, and Mike Brown and the Operations team. At Heathrow, Sofitel, British Airways, Gate Gourmet, the UK Border Authority and OCS. At Profile Books, Daniel Crewe, Ruth Killick and Paul Forty. Lesley Levene, Dorothy Straight and Fiona Screen for copy editing and proofreading. Richard Baker for the superlative images. Joana Niemeyer and David Pearson for the design. Caroline Dawnay and Nicole Aragi for the piloting. Charlotte, Samuel and Saul for another ruined August. In the text, some of the names have been changed to protect identities.