(my underlines)
The horror of airports
There is not a single redeeming feature
You really have to force yourself to love flying. Sitting on the tarmac for an hour and a half with an air conditioning unit that won’t turn off and two babies locked in a battle of who can scream the loudest is not in my ‘Top 10 Days Well Spent For Zak’. But the plane is an experience. Though commercial air travel has been a possibility since 1914 – some argue earlier in the case of airships – we still go through that shudder of glee (or fright) when the plane does the impossible and leaves the ground. For all of the pitfalls of flying, the miracle of air travel means there’s always something endearing about planes.
This does not apply to airports. Airports have no excuse. An airport is a Westfield with fewer knives. An airport does not need to go anywhere, to fly 40,000 ft in the sky with temperatures below -50°C. The airport is like the aeroplane’s lame younger brother. There is nothing good about an airport. Name one thing. And don’t say duty free or I’ll start rocking and beat myself over the head with one of those grotesquely large Toblerone bars.
You can rank British airports as much as you like, but they’re all the same. Horrible. That said, Luton Airport will always come in last place because it is a bungalow and reminds me of a documentary I watched about Chernobyl when I was ten.
I believe that the airport is designed to ruin your holiday so that you’ll book another one to make up for how bad the last trip was. It begins with the getting there. I tend to travel to the airport in the seedy hours of the morning. This is not because I like waking up in the dead of night with an upset tummy and all the focus of a toddler after a packet of discontinued blue Smarties. It is because I am cheap and Ryanair likes to send you to places before the nightclubs close. I recognise that this is counterproductive. The trains are never running and I always end up booking an Uber with a driver who tells me the coach would have been cheaper (he’s getting a two-star review and no tip).
I only ever travel with a carry-on bag. I don’t bother with checked luggage. I think I might have a Christian Bale on the set of Terminator Salvation level meltdown if I did. This means my first port of call is security. Security staff need a lesson in efficiency. They’ll spend half an hour chewing gum and throwing all of your personal items onto their dirty metal table just to find your haemorrhoid cream (it’s 101ml). It’s also one of the slowest processes known to Man. Forty-five minutes can feel like 45 hours as you shuffle behind a family of six shouting about grandad’s whereabouts.
After security you must run the gauntlet that is the aforementioned duty free. Duty free is a real head thumper. I actually feel sorry for the staff who work there. I’m sure back in the glory days of air travel – 1973: the year David Cassidy flew to Heathrow Airport – duty free was somewhat glamorous. Now it’s all about flapping soggy strips of card in bleary-eyed, teary-eyed faces to the brain-altering loop of Jess Glynne’s ‘Hold My Hand’. I’ve learnt that the best way to deal with duty free is to blink a lot and mumble gibberish as fast as you can. This should create the illusion of insanity and the salespeople will leave you alone. Just make sure the security don’t see you or you’ll be dragged off to a barren room behind W.H. Smith’s and beaten for information.
The terminal is the sunken place – it ranks higher than Sartre’s Huis clos on my list of most existentially upsetting things. The world doesn’t make sense here. Drinking a pint of lager with a Nando’s at 3.50 a.m. is perfectly normal. Sleeping on the ice sheet ground with all of your possessions on display is fine. Buying Rhonda Byrne’s The Secret with no intention of reading it is par for the course. I hate it here, though a small part of me loves the theatre. Everyone is equal in the terminal. Hugh Grant could be sat in the Stansted Burger King and few would care. A huge cross section of society is kettled into a circular arena, forced to make the choice between Jamie’s Italian (hasn’t that gone bust?) or a dank Joe and the Juice. The answer is always Wetherspoons.
When the pilot finally turns up three hours after your departure time, the gate will open. Then it’s another wait while the priority passes are scanned. By this point, you’d be happy to fly in the hold with the dogs just to leave this modern Gomorrah behind.
The late A.A. Gill wrote a brilliant piece about picking his daughter up from the airport when she was 19. In it, he wrote about watching two sisters run towards each other and break down in tears. ‘Without words, you knew that a parent had died,’ he wrote. I don’t like airports. I think I’ve made that pretty clear. But there is nowhere else on earth that captures life’s briefness. Arrivals. Duty free. Departures.
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