A Week at the Airport

1 The security line was impressive as always, numbering at least a hundred people reconciled, though with varying degrees of acceptance, to the idea of not doing very much else with the next twenty minutes of their lives.

The station furthest to the left was staffed by Jim at the scanner, Nina at the manual bag check and Balanchandra at the metal detector. Each had submitted to an arduous year-long course, the essential purpose of which was to train them to look at every human being as though he or she might want to blow up an aircraft – a thoroughgoing reversal of our more customary impulse to find common ground with new acquaintances. The team had been taught to overcome all prejudices as to what an enemy might look like: it could well be the six-year-old girl holding a carton of apple juice and her mother’s hand or the frail grandmother flying to Zurich for a funeral. Suspects, guilty until proved innocent, would therefore need to be told in no uncertain terms to step aside from their belongings and stand straight up against the wall.

Like thriller writers, the security staff were paid to imagine life as a little more eventful than it customarily manages to be. I felt sympathy for them in their need to remain alert at every moment of their careers, perpetually poised to react to the most remote of possibilities, of the sort that occurred globally in their line of work perhaps only once in a decade, and even then probably in Larnaca or Baku. They were like members of an evangelical sect living in a country devoid of biblical precedents – Belgium, say, or New Zealand – whose beliefs had inspired a daily expectation of a local return of the Messiah, a prospect not to be discounted even at 3.00 p.m. on a Wednesday in suburban Liège. How enviously the staff must have considered the lot of ordinary policemen and women, who, despite their often unsociable hours and wearying foot patrols, could at least look forward to having regular encounters with exactly the sorts of characters whom they had been trained to deal with.

I felt additional sympathy for the staff as a result of the limited curiosity they were permitted to bring to bear on the targets of their searches. Despite having free rein to look inside any passenger’s make-up bag, diary or photo album, they were allowed to investigate only evidence pointing to the presence of explosive devices or murder weapons. There was therefore no sanction for them to ask for whom a neatly wrapped package of underwear was intended, nor any official recognition of how tempting it might occasionally seem to stroke the back pockets of a pair of low-slung jeans without any desire to discover a semi-automatic pistol.

So great was the pressure imposed on the team by the need for vigilance that they were granted more frequent tea breaks than other employees. Every hour they would repair to a room fitted out with dispensing machines, frayed armchairs and pictures of the world’s most-wanted terrorists, a series of angry-looking, prophet-like figures with long beards and inscrutable eyes, apparently holed up in mountain caves and reluctant ever to venture into Terminal 5.

It was in this room that I spotted two women who looked as if they might be students enrolled in some sort of internship programme. When I smiled at them, hoping thereby to make them feel a bit more welcome, they came over to greet me and introduced themselves as the two most senior security officers in the building. In charge of training for the entire security staff at Terminal 5, Rachel and Simone regularly taught teams how to disarm terrorists and what positions to adopt in order to protect themselves in the event of a grenade being thrown. They also gave individual employees basic instruction in the use of semiautomatic weapons. Their close focus on anti-terrorism seemed to colour all aspects of their lives: in their spare time, they both read whatever literature they could find on the subject. Rachel was a specialist in the 1976 Entebbe operation, Simone a keen student of the Hindawi Affair, in which a Jordanian man, Nezar Hindawi, had given a Semtex-filled bag to his pregnant girlfriend and persuaded her to board an El Al plane for Tel Aviv. Though the plot had failed, Simone explained (unknowingly damning my naive conclusions on the wisdom of bothering to search certain sorts of passengers), the incident had forever changed the way security personnel the world over would look at pregnant women, small children and kindly grandmothers.

If many passengers became anxious or angry upon being questioned or searched, it was because such investigations could easily begin to feel, if only on a subconscious level, like accusations, and might thereby slot into pre-existing proclivities towards a sense of guilt.

A long wait for a scanning machine can induce many of us to start asking ourselves if we have perhaps after all left home with an explosive device hidden in our case, or unwittingly submitted to a months-long terrorist training course. The psychoanalyst Melanie Klein, in her Envy and Gratitude (1963), traced this latent sense of guilt back to an intrinsic part of human nature, originating in our Oedipal desire to murder our same-sex parent. So strong can the guilty feeling become in adulthood that it may provoke a compulsion to make false confessions to those in authority, or even to commit actual crimes as a means of gaining a measure of relief from an otherwise overwhelming impression of having done something wrong.

Safe passage through security did have one advantage, at least for those plagued (like the author) by a vague sense of their own culpability. A noiseless, unchecked progress through the detectors allowed one to advance into the rest of the terminal with a feeling akin to that one may experience on leaving church after confession or synagogue on the Day of Atonement, momentarily absolved and relieved of some of the burden of one’s sins.

2 There was a good deal of shopping to be done on the other side of security, where more than one hundred separate retail outlets vied for the attention of travellers – a considerably greater number than were to be found in the average shopping centre. This statistic regularly caused critics to complain that Terminal 5 was more like a mall than an airport, though it was hard to determine what might be so wrong with this balance, what precise aspect of the building’s essential aeronautical identity had been violated or even what specific pleasure passengers had been robbed of, given that we are inclined to visit malls even when they don’t provide us with the additional pleasure of a gate to Johannesburg.

At the entrance to the main shopping zone was a currency-exchange desk. Although we are routinely informed that we live in a vast and diverse world, we may do little more than nod distractedly at this idea until the moment comes when we find ourselves at the back of a bureau de change lined with a hundred safe-deposit boxes, some containing neat sheaves of Uruguayan pesos, Turkmenistani manats and Malawian kwachas. The trading desks of the City of London might perform their transactions with incomparable electronic speed, but patient physical contact with thick bundles of notes offered a very different sort of immediacy: a living sense of the miscellany of the human species. These notes, in every colour and font, were decorated with images of strongmen, dictators, founding fathers, banana trees and leprechauns. Many were worn and creased from heavy use. They had helped to pay for camels in Yemen or saddles in Peru, been stashed in the wallets of elderly barbers in Nepal or under the pillows of schoolboys in Moldova. A fraying fifty-kina note from Papua New Guinea (bird of paradise on the back, Prime Minister Michael Somare on the front) hardly hinted at the sequence of transactions (from fruit to shoes, guns to toys) that had culminated in its arrival at Heathrow.

Across the way from the exchange desk was the terminal’s largest bookshop. Seemingly in spite of the author’s defensive predictions about the commercial future of books (perhaps linked to the unavailability of any of his titles at any airport outlet), sales here were soaring. One could buy two volumes and get a third for free, or pick up four and be eligible for a fizzy drink. The death of literature had been exaggerated. Whereas on dating websites, those who like books are usually bracketed into a single category, the broad selections on offer at WH Smith spoke to the diversity of individuals’ motives for reading. If there was a conclusion to be drawn from the number of bloodstained covers, however, it was that there was a powerful desire, in a wide cross-section of airline passengers, to be terrified. High above the earth, they were looking to panic about being murdered, and thereby to forget their more mundane fears about the success of a conference in Salzburg or the challenges of having sex for the first time with a new partner in Antigua.

I had a chat with a manager named Manishankar, who had been working at the shop since the terminal first opened. I explained – with the excessive exposition of a man spending a lonely week at the airport – that I was looking for the sort of books in which a genial voice expresses emotions that the reader has long felt but never before 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.

Manishankar wondered if I might like a magazine instead. There was no shortage, including several with feature articles on how to look good after forty – advice of course predicated on the assumption that one’s appearance had been pleasing at thirty-nine (the writer’s age).

Nearby, another bookcase held an assortment of classic novels, which had been imaginatively arranged, not by author or title, but according to the country in which their narratives were set. Milan Kundera was being suggested as a guide to Prague, and Raymond Carver depended upon to reveal the hidden character of the small towns between Los Angeles and Santa Fe. Oscar Wilde once remarked that there had been less fog in London before James Whistler started to paint, and one wondered if the silence and sadness of isolated towns in the American West had not been similarly less apparent before Carver began to write.

Every skilful writer foregrounds notable aspects of experience, details that might otherwise be lost in the mass of data that continuously bathes our senses – and in so doing prompts us to find and savour these in the world around us. Works of literature could be seen, in this context, as immensely subtle instruments by means of which travellers setting out from Heathrow might be urged to pay more careful attention to such things as the conformity and corruption of Cologne society (Heinrich Böll), the quiet eroticism of provincial Italy (Italo Svevo) or the melancholy of Tokyo’s subways (Kenzaburō Ōe).

3 It was only after several days of frequenting the shops that I started to understand what those who objected to the dominance of consumerism at the airport might have been complaining about. The issue seemed to centre on an incongruity between shopping and flying, connected in some sense to the desire to maintain dignity in the face of death.

Despite the many achievements of aeronautical engineers over the last few decades, the period before boarding an aircraft is still statistically more likely to be the prelude to a catastrophe than a quiet day in front of the television at home. It therefore tends to raise questions about how we might best spend the last moments before our disintegration, in what frame of mind we might wish to fall back down to earth – and the extent to which we would like to meet eternity surrounded by an array of duty-free bags.

Those who attacked the presence of the shops might in essence have been nudging us to prepare ourselves for the end. At the Blink beauty bar, I felt anew the relevance of the traditional religious call to seriousness voiced in Bach’s Cantata 106:

Bestelle dein Haus,

Denn du wirst Sterben,

Und nicht lebendig bleiben.

Set thy house in order,

For thou shalt die,

And not remain alive.

Despite its seeming mundanity, the ritual of flying remains indelibly linked, even in secular times, to the momentous themes of existence – and their refractions in the stories of the world’s religions. We have heard about too many ascensions, too many voices from heaven, too many airborne angels and saints to ever be able to regard the business of flight from an entirely pedestrian perspective, as we might, say, the act of travelling by train. Notions of the divine, the eternal and the significant accompany us covertly on to our craft, haunting the reading aloud of the safety instructions, the weather announcements made by our captains and, most particularly, our lofty views of the gentle curvature of the earth.

4 It seemed appropriate that I should bump into two clergymen just outside a perfume outlet, which released the gentle, commingled smell of some eight thousand varieties of scent. The older of the pair, the Reverend Sturdy, wore a high-visibility jacket with the words ‘Airport Priest’ printed on the back. In his late sixties, he had a vast and archetypically ecclesiastical beard and gold-rimmed spectacles. The cadence of his speech was impressively slow and deliberate, like that of a scholar unable to ignore, even for a moment, the nuances behind every statement, and accustomed to living in environments where these could be investigated to their furthest conclusions without fear of inconveniencing or delaying others. His colleague, Albert Kahn, likewise garbed for high visibility – though his jacket, borrowed from another staff member, read merely ‘Emergency Services’ – was in his early twenties and on a work placement at Heathrow while completing theological studies at Durham University.

‘What do people tend to come to you to ask?’ I enquired of the Reverend Sturdy as we passed by an outlet belonging to that perplexingly indefinable clothing brand Reiss. There was a long pause, during which a disembodied voice reminded us once more never to leave our luggage unattended.

‘They come to me when they are lost,’ the Reverend replied at last, emphasising the final word so that it seemed to reflect the spiritual confusion of mankind, a hapless race of beings described by St Augustine as ‘pilgrims in the City of Earth until they can join the City of God’.

‘Yes, but what might they be feeling lost about?’

‘Oh,’ said the Reverend with a sigh, ‘they are almost always looking for the toilets.’

Because it seemed a pity to end our discussion of metaphysical matters on such a note, I asked the two men to tell me how a traveller might most productively spend his or her last minutes before boarding and take-off. The Reverend was adamant: the task, he said, was to turn one’s thoughts intently to God.

‘But what if one can’t believe in him?’ I pursued.

The Reverend fell silent and looked away, as though this were not a polite question to ask of a priest. Happily, his colleague, weaned on a more liberal theology, delivered an equally succinct but more inclusive reply, to which my thoughts often returned in the days to come as I watched planes taxiing out to the runways: ‘The thought of death should usher us towards whatever happens to matter most to us; it should lend us the courage to pursue the way of life we value in our hearts.’

5 Just beyond the security area was a suite, named after an ill-fated supersonic jet and reserved for the use of first-class passengers. The advantages of wealth can sometimes be hard to see: expensive cars and wines, clothes and meals are nowadays rarely proportionately superior to their cheaper counterparts, due to the sophistication of modern processes of design and mass production. But in this sense, British Airways’ Concorde Room was an anomaly. It was humblingly and thought-provokingly nicer than anywhere else I had ever seen at an airport, and perhaps in my life.

There were leather armchairs, fireplaces, marble bathrooms, a spa, a restaurant, a concierge, a manicurist and a hairdresser. One waiter toured the lounge with plates of complimentary caviar, foie gras and smoked salmon, while a second made circuits with éclairs and strawberry tartlets.

‘For what purpose is all the toil and bustle of this world? What is the end of the pursuit of wealth, power and pre-eminence?’ asked Adam Smith in The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), going on to answer, ‘To be observed, to be attended to, to be taken notice of with sympathy, complacency, and approbation’ – a set of ambitions to which the creators of the Concorde Room had responded with stirring precision.

As I took a seat in the restaurant, I felt certain that whatever it had taken for humanity to arrive at this point had ultimately been worth it. The development of the combustion engine, the invention of the telephone, the Second World War, the introduction of real-time financial information on Reuters screens, the Bay of Pigs, the extinction of the slender-billed curlew – all of these things had, each in its own fashion, helped to pave the way for a disparate group of uniformly attractive individuals to silently mingle in a splendid room with a view of a runway in a cloud-bedecked corner of the Western world.

‘There is no document of culture that is not at the same time a document of barbarism,’ the literary critic Walter Benjamin had once famously written, but that sentiment no longer seemed to matter very much.

Still, I recognised the fragility of the achievement behind the lounge. I sensed how relatively few such halcyon days there might be left before members of the small fraternity ensconced in its armchairs came to grief and its gilded ceilings cracked into ruin. Perhaps it had felt a bit like this on the terraces of Hadrian’s villa outside Rome on autumn Sunday evenings in the second century AD, as a blood-red sun set over the marble colonnades. One might have had a similar presentiment of catastrophe, looming in the form of the restless Germanic tribes lying in wait deep in the sombre pine forests of the Rhine Valley.

I started to feel sad about the fact that I might not be returning to the Concorde Room anytime soon. I realised, however, that the best way to attenuate my grief would be to nurture a thoroughgoing hatred of all those more regularly admitted into the premises. Over a plate of porcini mushrooms on a brioche base, I therefore tried out the idea that the lounge was really a hideout for a network of oligarchs who had won undeserved access through varieties of nepotism and skulduggery.

Regrettably, on closer examination, I was forced to concede that the evidence conflicted unhelpfully with this otherwise consoling thesis, for my fellow guests fitted none of the stereotypes of the rich. Indeed, they stood out chiefly on the basis of how ordinary they looked. These were not the chinless heirs to hectares of countryside but rather normal people who had figured out how to make the microchip and spreadsheet work on their behalf. Casually dressed, reading books by Malcolm Gladwell, they were an elite who had come into their wealth by dint of intelligence and stamina. They worked at Accenture fixing irregularities in supply chains or built income-ratio models at MIT; they had started telecommunications companies or did astrophysical research at the Salk Institute. Our society is affluent in large part because its wealthiest citizens do not behave the way rich people are popularly supposed to. Simple plunder could never have built up this sort of lounge (globalised, diverse, rigorous, technologically-minded), but at best a few gilded pleasure palaces standing out in an otherwise feudal and backward landscape.

In the rarefied air that was pumped into the Concorde Room, there nonetheless hovered a hint of something troubling: the implicit suggestion that the three traditional airline classes represented nothing less than a tripartite division of society according to people’s genuine talents and virtues. Having abolished the caste systems of old and fought to ensure universal access to education and opportunity, it seemed that we might have built up a meritocracy that had introduced an element of true justice into the distribution of wealth as well as of poverty. In the modern era, destitution could therefore be regarded as not merely pitiable but deserved. The question of why, if one was in any way talented or adept, one was still unable to earn admittance to an elegant lounge was a conundrum for all economy airline passengers to ponder in the privacy of their own minds as they perched on hard plastic chairs in the overcrowded and chaotic public waiting areas of the world’s airports.

The West once had a powerful and forgiving explanation for exclusion from any sort of lounge: for two thousand years Christianity rejected the notion, inherent in the modern meritocratic system, that virtue must inevitably usher in material success. Jesus was the highest man, the most blessed, and yet throughout his earthly life he was poor, thus by his very example ruling out any direct equation between righteousness and wealth. The Christian story emphasised that, however apparently equitable our educational and commercial infrastructures might seem, random factors and accidents would always conspire to wreck any neat alignment between the hierarchies of wealth on the one hand and virtue on the other. According to St Augustine, only God himself knew what each individual was worth, and He would not reveal that assessment before the time of the Last Judgement, to the sound of thunder and the trumpets of angels – a phantasmagorical scenario for non-believers, but helpful nevertheless in reminding us to refrain from judging others on the basis of a casual look at their tax returns.

The Christian story has neither died out nor been forgotten. That it continues even now to scratch away at meritocratic explanations of privilege was made clear to me when, after a copious lunch rounded off by a piece of chocolate cake with passionfruit sorbet, an employee called Reggie described for me the complicated set of circumstances that had brought her to the brutally decorated staff area of the Concorde Room from a shantytown outside Puerto Princesa in the Philippines. Our preference for the meritocratic versus the Christian belief system will in the end determine how we decide to interpret the relative standing of a tracksuited twenty-seven-year-old entrepreneur reading the Wall Street Journal by a stone-effect fireplace while waiting to board his flight to Seattle, against that of a Filipina cleaner whose job it is to tour the bathrooms of an airline’s first-class lounge, swabbing the shower cubicles of their diverse and ever-changing colonies of international bacteria.

6 Although the majority of its users regarded it as little more than a place where they had to spend a few hours on their way to somewhere else, for many others the terminal served as a permanent office, one that accommodated a thousand-strong bureaucracy across a series of floors off limits to the general public. The work done here was not well suited to those keen on seeing their own identities swiftly or flatteringly reflected back at them through their labour. The terminal had taken some twenty years and half a million people to build, and now that it was finally in operation, its business continued to proceed ponderously and only by committee. Layer upon layer of job titles (Operational Resource Planning Manager, Security Training and Standards Adviser, Senior HR Business Partner) gave an indication of the scale of the hierarchies that had to be consulted before a new computer screen could be acquired or a bench repositioned.

A few of the more obscure offices nonetheless managed to convey an impressive sense of the scope of the manpower and intelligence involved in getting planes around the world. The area housing British Airways’ Customer Experience Division was filled with prototypes of cabin seats, life jackets, vomit bags, mints and towelettes. An archivist oversaw a room filled with rejected samples, most of which had ended up there on the grounds of cost, not so much because of the airline’s miserliness as because of its sheer size, an overspend on a single chair having dramatic consequences when typing out a purchase order for thirty thousand of them. A tour of the premises, with a close look at the early designs for plane interiors, offered a pleasure similar to that of looking through the first draft of a manuscript and seeing that prose that would eventually be polished and sure had started out hesitant and confused – a lesson with consoling applications for a universal range of maiden efforts.

I came away from the back rooms of the airport regretting what seemed a wrong-headed imbalance between the lavish attention paid to distracting and entertaining travellers and the scant time spent educating them about the labour involved in their journeys.

It is a good deal more interesting to find out how an airline meal is made than how it tastes – and a good deal more troubling. A mile from the terminal, in a windowless refrigerated factory owned by the Swiss company Gate Gourmet, eighty thousand breakfasts, lunches and dinners, all intended for ingestion within the following fifteen hours somewhere in the troposphere, were being made up by a group of women from Bangladesh and the Baltic. Korean Airlines would be serving beef broth, JAL salmon teriyaki and Air France a chicken escalope on a bed of puréed carrots. Foods that would later be segregated according to airline and destination now mingled freely together, like passengers in the terminal, so that a tray containing a thousand plates of Dubai-bound Emirates hummus might be lined up in the freezer room next to four trolleys full of SAS gravadlax, set to fly part-way to Stockholm.

Aeroplane food stands at a point of maximum tension between the man-made and the natural, the technological and the organic. Even the most anaemic tomato (and the ones at Gate Gourmet were mesmerising in their fibrous pallor) remains a work of nature. How strange and terrifying, then, that we should take our fruit and vegetables up into the sky with us, when we used to sit more humbly at nature’s feet, hosting harvest festivals to honour the year’s wheat crop and sacrificing animals to ensure the continued fecundity of the earth.

There is no need for such prostration now. A batch of twenty thousand cutlets, which had once, if only briefly, been attached to lambs born and nursed on Welsh hillsides, was driven into the depot. Within hours, with the addition of a breadcrumb topping, a portion of these would metamorphose into meals that would be eaten over Nigeria – with no thought or thanks given to their author, twenty-six-year-old Ruta from Lithuania.

7 The British Airways flight crews also maintained offices at the airport. In an operations room in Terminal 5, pilots stopped by throughout the day and into the evening to consult with their managers about what the weather was like over Mongolia, or how much fuel they ought to purchase in Rio. When I saw an opening, I introduced myself to Senior First Officer Mike Norcock, who had been flying for fifteen years and who greeted me with one of those wry, indulgent smiles often bestowed by professionals upon people with a more artistic calling. In his 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.

Norcock had come to the operations room to pick up some route maps. He was off to India in his jumbo but first wanted to double-check the weather over Iran’s northern border. He knew so much that his passengers did not. He understood, for example, that the sky, which we laypeople so casually and naively tend to appraise in terms of its colour and cloud formations, was in fact criss-crossed by coded flight lanes, intersections, junctions and beacon signals. On this day, he was especially concerned with VAN115.2, both a small orange dot on the flight charts and a wooden shed two metres high and five across, situated on the edge of a farmer’s field at the top of a gorge in a thinly inhabited part of eastern Turkey – a location where Norcock would in a few hours be taking a left fork on to airway R659, as his passengers anxiously anticipated their lunch, a lasagne being prepared even now in Gate Gourmet’s factory. I looked at his steady, well-sculpted hands and thought of how far he had come since childhood.

I knew, at least in theory, that Norcock could not always, in every circumstance, be a model of authoritative and patriarchal behaviour. He, too, must be capable of petulance, of vanity, of acting foolishly, of making casually cruel remarks to his spouse or neglecting to understand his children. There are no directional charts for daily life. But at the same time, I was reluctant to either accept or exploit the implications of this knowledge. I wanted to believe in the capacity of certain professions to enable us to escape the ordinary run of our frailties and to accede, if only for a moment, to a more impressive sort of existence than most of us will ever know.

8 From the outset, my employer had suggested that I might wish to conduct a brief interview with one of the most powerful men in the terminal: the head of British Airways, Willie Walsh. It was a daunting prospect, as Walsh was having a busy time of it. His company was losing an average of £1.6 million a day, a total of £148 million over the previous three months. His pilots and cabin crew were planning strikes. Studies showed that his baggage handlers misappropriated more luggage than their counterparts at any other European airline. The government wanted to tax his fuel. Environmental activists had been chaining themselves to his fences. He had infuriated those in the upper echelons at Boeing by telling them that he would not be able to keep up with the prepayment schedule he had committed to for the new 787 aircraft he had ordered. His efforts to merge his airline with Qantas and Iberia had stalled. He had done away with the free chocolates handed round after every meal in business class, and in the process provoked a three-day furore in the British press.

Journalism has long been enamoured of the idea of the interview, beneath which lies a fantasy about access: a remote figure, beyond the reach of the ordinary public and otherwise occupied with running the world, opens up and reveals his innermost self to a correspondent. With admission set at the price of a newspaper, the audience is invited to forget their station in life and accompany the interviewer into the palace or the executive suite. The guards lay down their weapons, the secretaries wave the visitors through. Now we are in the inner sanctum. While waiting, we have a look around. We learn that the president likes to keep a bowl of peppermints on his desk, or that the leading actress has been reading Dickens.

But the tantalising promise of shared secrets is rarely fulfilled as we might wish, for it is almost never in the interests of a prominent figure to become intimate with a member of the press. He has better people on to whom to unburden himself. He does not need a new friend. He is not going to disclose his plots for vengeance or his fears about his professional future. For the celebrity, the interview is thus generally reduced to an exercise in saying as little as possible without confounding the self-love of the journalist on the sofa, who might become dangerous if rendered too starkly aware of the futility of his mission. In a bid to appease the underlying demand for closeness, the subject may let it drop that he is about to go on holiday to Florida, or that his daughter is learning how to play tennis.

There was evidently nothing of standard consequence that I could ask Mr Walsh. There was no point in my bringing up pensions, carbon emissions, premium yields or even the much-missed chocolates – no point, really, in our meeting at all, had not events reached the stage where articulating this insight would have seemed rude.

So we got together for forty minutes in a conference room, between Mr Walsh’s meeting with a trade-union representative and a delegation from Airbus. I felt as if I were interrupting a discussion of beachheads between Roosevelt and Churchill in May 1943.

Fortunately, I had come to the conclusion that though Mr Walsh was the CEO of one of the world’s largest airlines, it would be wholly unfair of me to treat him like a businessman. The fiscal state of his company was simply too precarious, and too woefully inaccurate a reflection of his talents and interests, to permit me to confuse Mr Walsh with his balance sheet.

Considered collectively, as a cohesive industry, civil aviation had never in its history shown a profit. Just as significantly, neither had book publishing. In this sense, then, the CEO and I, despite our apparent differences, were in much the same sort of business, each one needing to justify itself in the eyes of humanity not so much by its bottom line as by its ability to stir the soul. It seemed as unfair to evaluate an airline according to its profit-and-loss statement as to judge a poet by her royalty statements. The stock market could never put an accurate price on the thousands of moments of beauty and interest that occurred around the world every day under an airline’s banner: it could not describe the sight of Nova Scotia from the air, it had no room in its optics for the camaraderie enjoyed by employees in the Hong Kong ticket office, it had no means of quantifying the adrenalin-thrill of take-off.

The logic of my argument was not lost on Mr Walsh, who had himself once been a pilot. As we talked, he expressed his admiration for the way planes, vast and complicated machines, could defy their size and the challenges of the atmosphere to soar into the sky. We remarked on the surprise we both felt on seeing a 747 at a gate, dwarfing luggage carts and mechanics, at the idea that such a leviathan could move – a few metres’ distance, let alone across the Himalayas. We reflected on the pleasure of seeing a 777 take off for New York and, over the Staines reservoir, retract its flaps and wheels, which it would not require again until its descent over the white clapboard houses of Long Beach, some 5,000 kilometres and six hours of sea and cloud away. We exclaimed over the beauty of a crowded airfield, where, through the heat haze of turbofans, the interested observer can make out sequences of planes waiting to begin their journeys, their fins a confusion of colours against the grey horizon, like sails at a regatta. In another life, I decided, the chief executive and I might have become good friends.

We were getting on so well that Mr Walsh – or Willie, as he now urged me to call him – suggested we repair to the lobby downstairs, where we could have a look at a model of the new A380, twelve of which he had ordered from Airbus and which would be joining the British Airways fleet in 2012. Once we were standing before it, Willie, with what seemed a child’s sense of delight, invited me to join him in climbing up on to a bench to appreciate the sheer scale of the jet’s ailerons and the breadth of its fuselage.

So much warmth did I feel for him as we stood shoulder to shoulder, admiring his model plane, that I was emboldened to mention a fantasy I had harboured since I first received authorisation to write a book about Heathrow. I asked Willie whether, if he had any money left, he might one day consider appointing me his writer-in-flight, in order that I might constantly circumnavigate the earth composing, among other things, sincere dedications to my patron, impressionistic essays describing the ochre colours of the western Australian desert as seen from the flight deck, and vignettes recounting the balletic routines of the stewards in the galley.

There was a pause, and for a moment the bonhomie disappeared from the chief executive’s handsome grey-green eyes. But soon enough it returned. ‘Of course,’ he said, beaming. ‘Once at Aer Lingus, the video system broke down, and we invited a couple of Irish minstrels to sing songs on a flight to New York. Alan, I could see you at the front of the cabin doing a ditty or two for our passengers.’ And following that prognostication, he apologised for taking up so much of my precious time and called for a security officer to escort me to the door of his corporate headquarters.

9 Not long into my stay, evening became my favourite time at the airport. By eight, most of the choppy short-haul European traffic had come and gone. The terminal was emptying out, Caviar House was selling the last of its sturgeon eggs and the cleaning teams were embarking on the day’s most systematic mopping of the floors. Because it was summer, the sun would not set for another forty minutes, and in the interim a gentle, nostalgic light would flood across the seating areas.

The majority of the passengers left in the terminal at this hour were booked on one or another of the flights that departed every evening for the East, unbeknownst to most of the households of north-west London which they crossed en route for Singapore, Seoul, Hong Kong, Shanghai, Tokyo and Bangkok.

The atmosphere in the waiting areas was lonely, but curiously, the feeling was benign for being so general, eliminating the unease that any one individual might otherwise experience at being the only one to be alone, and thus paradoxically making new connections seem possible in a way they might not have done in the more obviously convivial surroundings of a crowded city bar. At night, the airport emerged as a home of nomadic spirits, types who could not commit to any one country, who shied from tradition and were suspicious of settled community, and who were therefore nowhere more comfortable than in the intermediate zones of the modern world, landscapes gashed by kerosene storage tanks, business parks and airport hotels.

Because the arrival of night typically pulls us back towards the hearth, there seemed something especially brave about travellers who were preparing to entrust themselves to the darkness, to be carried in a craft navigated by instruments alone and to surrender to sleep, finally, only over Azerbaijan or the Kalahari Desert.

In a control room beside the terminal, a giant map of the world showed the real-time position of every plane in the British Airways fleet, as tracked by a string of satellites. Across the globe, 180 aircraft were on their way, together holding some one hundred thousand passengers. A dozen planes were crossing the North Atlantic, five were routing around a hurricane to the west of Bermuda, and one could be seen plotting a course over Papua New Guinea. The map was emblematic of a touching vigilance, for however far removed each craft was from its home airfield, however untethered and able it looked, it was never far from the minds of those in the control room in London, who, like parents worrying about their children, would not feel at ease until each of their charges had safely touched down.

Every night a few planes would be towed away from their gates to a set of giant hangars, where a phalanx of gangways and cranes would lock themselves around their organically shaped bodies like a series of handcuffs. While aircraft tended to be coy about their need to pay such visits – hardly letting on, at the close of a trip from Los Angeles or Hong Kong, that they had reached the very end of their permitted quota of nine hundred flying hours – the checks provided an opportunity for them to reveal their individuality. What to passengers might have looked like yet another indistinguishable 747 would emerge, during this process, as a machine with a distinct name and medical history: G-BNLH, for example, had come into service in 1990 and in the intervening years had had three hydraulic leaks over the Atlantic, once blown a tyre in San Francisco and, only the previous week, dropped an apparently unimportant part of its wing in Cape Town. Now it was coming into the hangar with, among other ailments, twelve malfunctioning seats, a large smear of purple nail polish on a wall panel and an opinionated microwave oven in a rear galley that ignited itself whenever an adjacent basin was used.

Thirty men would work on the plane through the night, the whole operation guided by an awareness that, while the craft could under most circumstances be extraordinarily forgiving, a chain of events originating in the failure of something as small as a single valve could nevertheless bring it down, just as a career might be ruined by one incautious remark, or a person die because of a clot less than a millimetre across.

I toured the exterior of the aircraft on a gangway that ran around its midriff and let my hands linger on its nose cone, which had only a few hours earlier carved a path through dense layers of static cumulus clouds.

Studying the plane’s tapered tail, and the marks left across the back of its fuselage by the enraged thrust of its four RB211 engines, I wondered if scientists and engineers might have designed planes and their means of take-off differently had our species been graced with some subtler, less thunderous mode of conception, perhaps one managed frictionlessly and quietly by the male’s sitting for a few hours on an egg left behind in a leafy recess by the female.

10 At around eleven-fifteen each night, by government decree, the airport was closed to both incoming and outgoing traffic. Across the aprons, all was suddenly as quiet as it must have been a hundred years ago, when there was nothing here but sheep meadows and apple farms. I met up with a man called Terry, whose job it was to tour the runways in the early hours looking out for stray bits of metal. We drove out to a spot at the end of the southern runway, 27L to pilots, which Terry termed the most expensive piece of real estate in Europe. It was here, at forty-second intervals throughout the day, on a patch of tarmac only a few metres square and black with rubber left by tyres, that the aircraft of the world made their first contact with the British Isles. This was the exact set of coordinates that planes anticipated from across southern England: even in the thickest fog, their automatic landing systems could pick up the glide-path beam that was projected up into the sky from this point, the radio wave calling them to place their wheels squarely in the centre of a zone highlighted by a double line of parallel white lights.

But just now, the patch of runway that was almost solely responsible for destroying the peace and quiet of some ten million people was becalmed. One could walk unhurriedly across it and even give in to the temptation to sit cross-legged on its centreline, a gesture that partook of some of the sublime thrill of touching a disconnected high-voltage electricity cable, running one’s fingers along the teeth of an anaesthetised shark or having a wash in a fallen dictator’s marble bathroom.

A field mouse scurried out of the grass and on to the runway, where for a moment it stood still, transfixed by the jeep’s headlamps. It was of a kind which regularly populates children’s books, where mice are always clever and good-natured creatures who live in small houses with red-and-white-checked curtains, in sharp contrast to the boorish humans, who are clumsily oversized and unaware of their own limits. Its presence this night on the moonlit tarmac served optimistically to suggest that when mankind is finished with flying – or more generally, with being – the earth will retain a capacity to absorb our follies and make way for more modest forms of life.

11 Terry dropped me off at my hotel. I felt too stimulated to sleep – and so went for a drink at an all-night bar frequented by delayed flight crews and passengers.

Over a dramatically sized tequila-based cocktail named an After Burner, I befriended a young woman who told me that she was writing a doctoral dissertation at the University of Warsaw: her subject was the Polish poet and novelist Zygmunt Krasiński, with a particular focus on his famous work Agaj-Han (1834) and the tragic themes explored therein. She argued that Krasiński’s reputation had been unfairly eclipsed during the twentieth century by that of his fellow Romantic writer Adam Mickiewicz, and explained that she had been motivated in her research by a desire to reacquaint her compatriots with an aspect of their heritage that had been deliberately denied them during the Communist era. When I asked why she was at the airport, she replied that she had come to meet a friend from Dubai, whose plane had been delayed and was now unlikely to land at Heathrow before mid-morning. An engineer of Lebanese origin, he had been coming to London once a month for the past year and a half in order to receive treatment for throat cancer at a private hospital in Marylebone, and during every visit, he invited her to spend the night with him in a Prestige Suite on the top floor of the Sofitel. She confided that she was registered with an agency which had a head office in Hayes and added, in a not unrelated aside, that Zygmunt Krasiński had conducted a three-year-long affair with the Countess Delfina Potocka, with whom Chopin had also been in love.

I returned to my room at three in the morning, struck by a sense of our race as a peculiar, combustible mixture of the beast and the angel. The first plane, due at Heathrow at dawn, was now somewhere over western Russia.