On Airports

How do you write about airports?

Brian Eno made music for them. Warm, delicate sounds, flowing out to fill big empty spaces. It’s hard to know if it would make the experience appreciably different. Airports are buildings designed to be easy to leave. When I enter an airport my only desire is to be eased along beige corridors, past rolling belts, through glass corridors, in as lubricated and painless a way as possible. A single conscious thought is a failure. In this they all begin to resemble each other. Look around, let your eyes unfocus so the glossy kiosks become a smudged blur of advert and souvenir, and you could be in Madrid, Manchester, Shanghai. Perhaps this is all one huge extradimensional organ, and we pass through its guts like chewed food, a sequence of increasingly small tubes. You may never smell the fresh air or see the sun from arriving at once entrance, to emerging, sunken-eyed and stinking, into the tropical heat or dull grey chill of a new place, or sometimes an old one. 

I have never missed a flight, except for the one I missed in Istanbul which was because I forgot the difference between AM and PM, and the one to Cologne where I failed to see my passport in plain sight in my home until it was too late. However I have certainly never been late for a flight. Even the one I missed, I was very early for the wrong one. There have been one or two near misses. A mad dash through Ho Chi Minh City because a single aberrant domestic flight was leaving from the international terminal for reasons which were not clear. One time in - I think - Vientiane, where a friend whose name has been redacted for privacy reasons left a broken mobile phone, battery-in, somewhere in the depths of her checked luggage, having been clinging onto it in the hopeless belief that there might be somewhere to get it repaired. You never think it will be your name in mangled Laotian on the tannoy.

Mostly, I am blessed. I can’t comprehend being late to an airport by choice. There’s usually a lot riding on this. Flights are already maximally stressful, and expensive as well. Is the extra hour in bed worth it? Get a grip. I’ll stand by your bed tapping my watch like Alex Ferguson in the 93rd minute if I have to. 

My bag is always asided for random checking. Always. I wish I could know what aspect of its composition causes a little red light to start blinking. They won’t tell me. So my liquids are checked and deemed gelignite free, and all my packing is disturbed, and then I am curtly told “okay” and head to the stainless steel table to begin the process of rezipping. Never make the first timer’s mistake of wondering whether you need to say anything except yes to every question, except on occasions where it’s more appropriate to say sí, ja or chai. Yes, you did pack your bag yourself. Yes, you are happy for them to search. No, you didn’t forget a bag in an old jacket pocket, you’re sure you didn’t, only empty bags turn up in strange places don’t they, shoved into whatever you can find in the rush to get out of a cubicle because someone who needs a shit is thundering on the door in increasingly angry tones. And I heard about someone who went to a Filipino jail because they found the end of a joint stuck in the grip under his shoe. 

I don’t get too nervous any more, unless I’m hungover or severely lacking sleep. So maybe it’s more accurate to say I don’t get nervous on outbound flights. When I’m feeling a little more emotionally vulnerable, a little ill, a little achey, and the first shuddering engine rumble comes through the seat, the feeling of motion, the rising vvvvvrrrrrrRRRRRRR, the sense that you definitely can’t get off any more, then perhaps I feel the first flutterings of animal panic. It would be mad not to. They say you’re more likely to die on a motorway, which is absolutely true. But on a motorway you’re unlikely to have a minute of screaming terror contemplating that fact. What works for me, at least on day flights, is looking out of the window. Not because it helps to ground the feeling of acceleration and godless motion in reality, but because I find the earth from above so moving that it brings a tear to my eye more often than not. We weren’t meant to see this. My forehead is pinioned to that window like a child. It is, perhaps, even a view worth dying for. 

On to Mexico!