A Week at the Airport: A Heathrow Diary
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When I first read Alain de Botton (The Art of Travel), I was almost jealous. It never occurred to me to write about why so many elements of travel hold such allure, such promise, and cause such deceptively seductive grass-is-greener syndrome.
But it turns out that Alain de Botton is way more thoughtful than me, and his contribution to modern philosophy is varied and extensive. I could never write about these things. But I sure do love to read them.
In his most recent book, A Week at the Airport: A Heathrow Diary, he asks the manager of WHSmith if he stocks "the sort of books in which a genial voice expresses emotions that the reader has long felt but never really understood; those that convey the secret, everyday things that society at large prefers to leave unsaid; those that make one feel somehow less alone and strange."
Like most other things, no one could express better what Alain de Botton writes about than the man himself.
Given my love of most things related to travel, I was looking forward to A Week at Heathrow. I've always wanted to walk around underneath a 747, so the idea of a writer having an all-access pass to one of the busiest airports in the world sounded pretty cool to me.
It turns out that it was. The book was commissioned by BAA, the owners of Heathrow, and was partly brought out to celebrate Terminal 5 (a fact de Botton wrestles with this fact as he's deciding whether or not to take the job). He became the writer-in-residence with a desk in Departures, and spent a week without leaving T5 or the connected Sofitel hotel.
Three sections follow, each filled with sentences delivering ideas you'd considered without realising it, and a level of detail that makes them intimate and inescapable.
Three of my favourite examples follow:
Departures
For British Airways planes, the approach to Terminal 5 was a return to their home base, equivalent to the final run up to the Plymouth Sound for their eighteenth-century naval predecessors. Having long been guests on foreign aprons, allotted awkward and remote slots at O'Hare or LAX, the odd ones out amid immodestly long rows of United and Delta aircraft, they now took their turn at having the superiority of numbers, lining up in perfect symmetry along the back of Satellite B.
Airside
In his (Senior First Officer Mike Norcock) presence, I felt like a child unsure of his father's affections. I realised that meeting pilots was doomed to escalate into an ever more humiliating experience for me, as the older I got, the more obvious it became that I would never be able to acquire the virtues that I so admired in them - their steadfastness, courage, decisiveness, logic and relevance - and must instead forever remain a hesitant and inadequate creature who would almost certainly start weeping if asked to land a 777 amid foggy ground conditions in Newfoundland.
Arrivals
There is no one, however lonely or isolated, however pessimistic about the human race, however preoccupied with the payroll, who does not in the end expect that someone significant will come and say hello at arrivals. Even if our loved ones have assured us that they will be busy at work, even if they told us they hated us for going travelling in the first place, even if they left us last June or died twelve and a half years ago, it is impossible not to experience a shiver of a sense that they may have come along anyway, just to surprise us and makes us feel special (as someone must have done for us when we were small, if only occasionally, or we would never have had the strength to make it this far).
Alain de Botton speaks for me, and for that, I am glad.
In his most recent book, A Week at the Airport: A Heathrow Diary, he asks the manager of WHSmith if he stocks "the sort of books in which a genial voice expresses emotions that the reader has long felt but never really understood; those that convey the secret, everyday things that society at large prefers to leave unsaid; those that make one feel somehow less alone and strange."
Like most other things, no one could express better what Alain de Botton writes about than the man himself.
Given my love of most things related to travel, I was looking forward to A Week at Heathrow. I've always wanted to walk around underneath a 747, so the idea of a writer having an all-access pass to one of the busiest airports in the world sounded pretty cool to me.
It turns out that it was. The book was commissioned by BAA, the owners of Heathrow, and was partly brought out to celebrate Terminal 5 (a fact de Botton wrestles with this fact as he's deciding whether or not to take the job). He became the writer-in-residence with a desk in Departures, and spent a week without leaving T5 or the connected Sofitel hotel.
Three sections follow, each filled with sentences delivering ideas you'd considered without realising it, and a level of detail that makes them intimate and inescapable.
Three of my favourite examples follow:
Departures
For British Airways planes, the approach to Terminal 5 was a return to their home base, equivalent to the final run up to the Plymouth Sound for their eighteenth-century naval predecessors. Having long been guests on foreign aprons, allotted awkward and remote slots at O'Hare or LAX, the odd ones out amid immodestly long rows of United and Delta aircraft, they now took their turn at having the superiority of numbers, lining up in perfect symmetry along the back of Satellite B.
Airside
In his (Senior First Officer Mike Norcock) presence, I felt like a child unsure of his father's affections. I realised that meeting pilots was doomed to escalate into an ever more humiliating experience for me, as the older I got, the more obvious it became that I would never be able to acquire the virtues that I so admired in them - their steadfastness, courage, decisiveness, logic and relevance - and must instead forever remain a hesitant and inadequate creature who would almost certainly start weeping if asked to land a 777 amid foggy ground conditions in Newfoundland.
Arrivals
There is no one, however lonely or isolated, however pessimistic about the human race, however preoccupied with the payroll, who does not in the end expect that someone significant will come and say hello at arrivals. Even if our loved ones have assured us that they will be busy at work, even if they told us they hated us for going travelling in the first place, even if they left us last June or died twelve and a half years ago, it is impossible not to experience a shiver of a sense that they may have come along anyway, just to surprise us and makes us feel special (as someone must have done for us when we were small, if only occasionally, or we would never have had the strength to make it this far).
Alain de Botton speaks for me, and for that, I am glad.
Here Is The Writer : Sarah Western Balzer
Sarah Western Balzer is the managing director of HITC Life and is always on the lookout for reader-writers, so if you'd like to be one, make yourself known (sarah.western@hereisthecity.com). Sarah moved to London six years ago from New York but is originally from Florida, and still suntans like it's 1989. She is so grateful to the banker who introduced her to Here Is The City that she married him, and they live in Wapping with their son.
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