In a journey interrupted by IT meltdowns, delays and baggage confusion, I had a chance to enjoy the places that nobody calls home.
I would have rather that my journey from Glasgow to Peterborough, Ontario hadn’t been interrupted by the collapse of the National Air Traffic Control Service’s IT system. But it was.
I should have known; this ticket has been jinxed from the start. It was meant to fly me to Las Vegas in June, but an earlier series of fiascos had meant that it was repurposed, at a price, to fly me to Canada and a new life as a PhD student. That was yesterday. I’m writing this looking at the Harrods outlet, Paul Smith and Gucci stores and duty-free concessions in Heathrow’s Terminal 2.
BA had put me up in a hotel – a faceless, soulless block of pseudo-luxury, whose name has already vanished from my mind but was probably that of a hotel chain inexplicably followed by something intended to sound comforting to those who like their glamour on a budget. Renaissance, da Vinci, Blu or whatever it might have been.
And so, here I am. Another few hours waiting for another flight; another grey plastic chair with arms positioned to make it impossible to lie down and lighting set to an indeterminate yet optimistic time of day.
The airline told me to keep my receipts and the captain on the second plane even mentioned compensation, although the subsequent silence on that subject has been intense - like parents studiously not mentioning the lady who kissed daddy at the party. Sometimes, it’s better to leave the kids to wonder than to exterminate hope with an explanation.
Through it all – the sympathy, the apologies, the forced patience and moments of genuine connection, I have kept a dirty little secret all to myself. I actually quite like airports. Given a choice, I would hang out in them even without a flight to catch.
I enjoy liminal spaces and terminals and airport hotels always have that surreal Stephen King feeling to them. A sense of placelessness that defies boundaries just as it creates its own conventions. Presumably those people in the bar at 7am wouldn’t do that in their regular lives, most of them anyway. Similarly, most of those stalking purposelessly around me don’t usually get their marmalade from Fortnum and Mason or pass their quiet hours contemplating Paul Smith scarves and Yves Saint Laurent handbags.
Or perhaps they do. Perhaps this is entirely normal behaviour and I’m the odd one out with my tube of Pringles and half a Dairy Milk in my hand luggage. But that’s the point, I don’t belong here and neither, I suspect, does anyone else. Air[ports are the Christmas cracker jokes of the built environment – we laugh as individuals but we groan as a collective.
The young man sitting at the end of my row looks like he might shop in Tesco, the elderly couple opposite have ‘M&S Foodhall but Lidl for fresh veg’ written all over them. But Ted Baker and Kurt Geiger are strangers to all of us in equal measure.
This sense of unbelonging is why I like truck stops and family restaurants like Denny's - the anonymity and the feeling that it's nobody's destination, just a staging point on countless journeys to points unknown. Perhaps those other diners have carefully selected this particular IHOP or Harvester, but I doubt it. They are places you pop in to, not places you go to - motels for the soul.
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