As a kid, I had a fairly narrow escape. In the eighties, Thatcher had the wisdom to close the local pits, and thereby closed off a career path which I might otherwise have fallen into. If I'd been born only ten years earlier, it could well have been a different story. But I wasn't, so at the time I thought I had escaped a fairly horrible fate. Life, I thought, held possibilities. How little I knew! Instead of working down'pit several hours a day, I now spend most of my working life killing time in airports. I skipped the coalface, but I still need to get into lifts and climb onto travellators to get to work, and instead of coal dust there's diesel fumes. It's the same games with different names.
Over the past couple of years, I have grown to hate airports with a passion. (I'm penning this from the airport lounge at Stockholm International, while I'm waiting - yet again - for a delayed flight to Warsaw). There was a time for me when airports had a little personality, and they held the excitement and anticipation of travel to some exotic destination, usually with a holiday in mind (it was rarely, if ever, I travelled with my job back then). Now the reverse is true. In fact it is so bad that when it came to booking the upcoming holiday to Italy, I did everything I could to avoid traveling by plane. Airports are now synonymous with queues, bad humours, heat, random and often savage security measures, tedium, more queues, and non-informative information announcements. And they all look the same too. On more than one occasion now, between connecting flights, I've stepped off of a plane and had that panic attack that signals that I do not only not know what airport I'm at, but I don't even know what country I am in. J.G. Ballard once called airports "instant communities". That's only partly true these days - now they are more like beachheads at the end of civilisation, where we can witness at first hand how the attrition of modern life is slowly rubbing out the human soul. Why? Because nowadays airports are always the first to respond to the front line dangers of how we live now, so the crap that currently happens at airports is a warning shot from the future that lies ahead of us all. God help us!
Only another two more hours to go. The Duty Free shop is closing and the cleaners are mowing the concrete. Why is that man holding a dead parrot?
... zzzzzzz
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