A Heathrow diary and inner demons

Monet/Gare Saint-Lazare

There've been famous reviews of Alain de Botton but whatever one thinks about him -the jury's out as far as I'm concerned - his A Week at The Airport has interesting reflections on travel, in particular airports. We rush through unseeing, intent on reaching our destination - steeling ourselves to endure a crowded, long flight - imagining that we will be dicing with death in the air.  But airports can be extraordinary structures - like the new Terminal 5.

"The mighty steel bracing of the airport's ceiling recalled the scaffolding of the great nineteenth-century railway stations and evoked the sense of awe - suggested in paintings such as Monet's Gare Saint-Lazare - that must have been experienced by the first crowds to step inside these light-filled, iron-limbed halls pulsating with strangers, buildings that enabled a person to sense viscerally, rather than just grasp intellectually, the vastness and diversity of humanity."

Like Paddington - such promise of adventure - sunshine - the sea - home. More on this here.

The best/most appealing airports though, in my experience, aren't the ones that awe - but the ones that are small and in which you can step almost immediately from one world into another. Remember waving goodbye to someone at Nantes and watching him waving back as I progressed almost to the departure gate; Tobago  - stepping out into colour and heat, the blue sea in the distance, the departure hall with sparkle (purple tinsel - did I imagine this?) Newquay - just so small. From plane to car park and the drive home in a few steps.

Even taking a bus from the plane to the terminal at the end of a journey can be exhilarating, rather than a tedious final stage to the exit. It involves stepping on to the tarmac and actually making contact with a new or familiar land - a blast of heat as you step off the plane always exciting.

De Botton also talks about people setting out on holiday having made endless arrangements but forgetting that they themselves, their thoughts and inner demons, are going too. Shades of Cavafy and Ithaka.

"As David lifted a suitcase on to the conveyor belt, he came to an unexpected and troubling realisation: that he was bringing himself with him on his holiday. Whatever the qualities of the Dimitra Residence, they were going to be critically undermined by the fact he would be in the villa as well.  He had booked the trip in the expectation of being able to enjoy his children, his wife, the Mediterranean, some spanakopita and the Attic skies, but it was evident that he would be forced to apprehend all of these through the distorting filter of his own being, with its debilitating levels of fear, anxiety and wayward desire.....

We cannot enjoy palm trees and azure pools if a relationship to which we are committed has abruptly revealed itself to be suffused with incomprehension and resentment."

End the day with an episode of Mad Men: Don Draper drinking after his daughter discovers him in flagrante delicto with the neighbour's wife.  He is spiralling down into despair.

The bar here seems an entire world. It's in Manhattan and the best kind of bar. Dark. With a bank of bottles. At best, bars promise something - a journey - not just a drink. A passage to another frame of mind.

When a station is more than a place to catch a train

"Railway stations have always attracted me, not just because trains are there, but because they are also ambivalent places, echoing with completed journeys and still with the melancholy noises of departures."
Eric Lomax/The Railway Man

"There is something illusionistic and illusionary about the relationship of time and space as we experience it in travelling."
W.G. Sebald/Austerlitz

Austerlitz/W G Sebald: opening scenes are at Antwerp station, designed by Delacenserie

"...which was inspired by the Pantheon in Rome, in such stupendous fashion that even today, said Austerlitz, exactly as the architect intended, when we step into the entrance hall we are seized by a sense of being beyond the profane, in a cathedral consecrated to international traffic and trade. Delacenserie borrowed the main elements of his monumental structure from the palaces of the Italian Renaissance, but he also struck Byzantine and Moorish notes, and perhaps when I arrived, said Austerlitz, I myself had noticed the round grey and white granite turrets, the sole purpose of which was to arouse medieval associations in the minds of railway passengers. ....it was also appropriate, he continued, that in Antwerp Station the elevated level from which the gods looked down on visitors to the Roman Pantheon should display, in hierarchical order, the deities of the nineteenth century - mining, industry, transport, trade and capital."

There are stone escutcheons with sheaves of corn, crossed hammers, winged wheels - a beehive - and a huge clock surveying all.

Antwerp Station

NOTES:
The clock dominates in Milan Centrale too: also signs of industry: a temple built at the height of the Fascist era.
The clock at Waterloo: a good meeting place.

Journey west

The Grillo sisters have been found not guilty. Watch the 1 o'clock news while waiting for the taxi.
A very measured taxi driver who asks if I've remembered everything: sunglasses, phone charger - tickets...."So many times I have people who are stressed, who forget tickets... one man, his wife said 'Where's your wedding ring?' He said 'I took it off when I washed my hands.' We had to drive back, down the M4 because they were going to a wedding and people would ask what was going on and think there was trouble in the marriage if he wasn't wearing a wedding ring.... another man, the children go to school on Brook Green, I do not know what is the matter with that man. He is in the car with his children and says ' What is two times two?' and the little girl is shaking and crying and her sister whispers 'Four'. Then he starts shouting 'How many times have I told you? Do you never listen?!'
"His wife is nice, very pretty. He's a bad man, I see him plenty of times with other girls. I've heard him talking in Polish, Eastern European girls, I know a bit of Polish. Once he was in the car with his wife and he had his laptop and she started shouting and crying and saying 'Why are you taking that? We are only going away for a few days.' He said there were things he needed to do.
"The last time I saw her I said 'How's your husband?' and she said don't talk about him, he's gone.
"Another woman with two children, 14 and 18, the husband went off but she said she loved him and took him back. But the son says he hates him.
"I came from Afghanistan. I saw my brother killed in a rocket attack, my mother had a heart attack. I came here... first to Thailand with the UN, then here...."
"Who helped you get your papers?"
"The UN, I came here with the UN. I was so lonely, I was sitting in the park, crying, I didn't know anyone. Then I started to work, got this taxi."
A mass exodus at Paddington, though I have seen worse. It's not quite Christmas Eve.

A perfect seat.
The man in front of me is talking about his dinner the night before ".... roast potatoes, turkey, pigs in blankets and ... and guess how much it all cost? Oh, don't be silly! £15 - so that's only £5 each.... Adam says the car park opposite his house is free after 8 o'clock.... if it's raining I'll drive and pick him up..."

Posted with Blogsy