1 While punctuality lies at the heart of what we typically understand by a good trip, I have often longed for my plane to be delayed – so that I might be forced to spend a bit more time at the airport. I have rarely shared this aspiration with other people, but in private I have hoped for a hydraulic leak from the undercarriage or a tempest off the Bay of Biscay, a bank of fog in Malpensa or a wildcat strike in the control tower in Málaga (famed in the industry as much for its hot-headed labour relations as for its even-handed command of much of western Mediterranean airspace). On occasion, I have even wished for a delay so severe that I would be offered a meal voucher or, more dramatically, a night at an airline’s expense in a giant concrete Kleenex box with unopenable windows, corridors decorated with nostalgic images of propeller planes and foam pillows infused with the distant smells of kerosene.
In the summer of 2009, I received a call from a man who worked for a company that owned airports. It held the keys to Southampton, Aberdeen, Heathrow and Naples, and oversaw the retail operations at Boston Logan and Pittsburgh International. The corporation additionally controlled large pieces of the industrial infrastructure upon which European civilisation relies (yet which we as individuals seldom trouble ourselves about as we use the bathroom in Białystok or drive our rental car to Cádiz): the waste company Cespa, the Polish construction group Budimex and the Spanish toll-road concern Autopista.
My caller explained that his company had lately developed an interest in literature and had taken a decision to invite a writer to spend a week at its newest passenger hub, Terminal 5, situated between the two runways of London’s largest airport. This artist, who was sonorously to be referred to as Heathrow’s first writer-in-residence, would be asked to conduct an impressionistic survey of the premises and then, in full view of passengers and staff, draw together material for a book at a specially positioned desk in the departures hall between zones D and E.
It seemed astonishing and touching that in our distracted age, literature could have retained sufficient prestige to inspire a multinational enterprise, otherwise focused on the managementof landing fees and effluents, to underwrite a venture invested with such elevated artistic ambitions. Nevertheless, as the man from the airport company put it to me over the telephone, with a lyricism as vague as it was beguiling, there were still many aspects of the world that perhaps only writers could be counted on to find the right words to express. A glossy marketing brochure, while in certain contexts a supremely effective instrument of communication, might not always convey the authenticity achievable by a single authorial voice – or, as my friend suggested with greater concision, could more easily be dismissed as ‘bullshit’.
2 Though the worlds of commerce and art have frequently been unhappy bedfellows, each viewing the other with a mixture of paranoia and contempt, I felt it would be churlish of me to decline to investigate my caller’s offer simply because his company administered airside food courts and hosted technologies likely to be involved in raising the planet’s median air temperature. There were undoubtedly some skeletons in the airport company’s closet, arising from its intermittent desire to pour cement over age-old villages and its skill in encouraging us to circumnavigate the globe on unnecessary journeys, laden with bags of Johnnie Walker and toy bears dressed up as guards of the British monarchy.
But with my own closet not entirely skeleton-free, I was in no position to judge. I understood that money accumulated on the battlefield or in the marketplace could fairly be redirected towards higher aesthetic ends. I thought of impatient ancient Greek statesmen who had once spent their war spoils building temples to Athena and ruthless Renaissance
In the summer of 2009, I received a call from a man who worked for a company that owned airports. It held the keys to Southampton, Aberdeen, Heathrow and Naples, and oversaw the retail operations at Boston Logan and Pittsburgh International. The corporation additionally controlled large pieces of the industrial infrastructure upon which European civilisation relies (yet which we as individuals seldom trouble ourselves about as we use the bathroom in Białystok or drive our rental car to Cádiz): the waste company Cespa, the Polish construction group Budimex and the Spanish toll-road concern Autopista.
My caller explained that his company had lately developed an interest in literature and had taken a decision to invite a writer to spend a week at its newest passenger hub, Terminal 5, situated between the two runways of London’s largest airport. This artist, who was sonorously to be referred to as Heathrow’s first writer-in-residence, would be asked to conduct an impressionistic survey of the premises and then, in full view of passengers and staff, draw together material for a book at a specially positioned desk in the departures hall between zones D and E.
It seemed astonishing and touching that in our distracted age, literature could have retained sufficient prestige to inspire a multinational enterprise, otherwise focused on the managementof landing fees and effluents, to underwrite a venture invested with such elevated artistic ambitions. Nevertheless, as the man from the airport company put it to me over the telephone, with a lyricism as vague as it was beguiling, there were still many aspects of the world that perhaps only writers could be counted on to find the right words to express. A glossy marketing brochure, while in certain contexts a supremely effective instrument of communication, might not always convey the authenticity achievable by a single authorial voice – or, as my friend suggested with greater concision, could more easily be dismissed as ‘bullshit’.
2 Though the worlds of commerce and art have frequently been unhappy bedfellows, each viewing the other with a mixture of paranoia and contempt, I felt it would be churlish of me to decline to investigate my caller’s offer simply because his company administered airside food courts and hosted technologies likely to be involved in raising the planet’s median air temperature. There were undoubtedly some skeletons in the airport company’s closet, arising from its intermittent desire to pour cement over age-old villages and its skill in encouraging us to circumnavigate the globe on unnecessary journeys, laden with bags of Johnnie Walker and toy bears dressed up as guards of the British monarchy.
But with my own closet not entirely skeleton-free, I was in no position to judge. I understood that money accumulated on the battlefield or in the marketplace could fairly be redirected towards higher aesthetic ends. I thought of impatient ancient Greek statesmen who had once spent their war spoils building temples to Athena and ruthless Renaissance
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