A Week at the Airport Read Online Free PDF

expectation, snapshots of travellers’ souls on their way to the skies – though it was hard to dismiss a worry about what a modest and static thing a book would always be next to the chaotic, living entity that was a terminal.
    11 At moments when I could not make headway with my writing, I would go and chat to Dudley Masters, who was based on the floor below me and had spent thirty years cleaning shoes at the airport. His day began at 8.30 a.m. and, around sixty pairs later, finished at 9.00 p.m.
    I admired the optimism with which Dudley confronted every new pair of shoes that paused at his station. Whatever their condition, he imagined the best for them, remedying their abuses with an armoury of brushes, waxes, creams and spray cleaners. He knew it was not evil that led people to go for eight months without applying even an all-purpose clear cream polish. He was like a kindly dentist who, on bringing down theceiling-mounted halogen lamp and asking new patients to open their mouths (‘Let’s have a look in here, shall we?’), remains aware of how complicated lives can become and so how easily people may give up flossing their teeth while they try to save their companies or minister to a dying parent.

    Though he was being paid to shine shoes, he knew that his real mission was psychological. He understood that people rarely have their shoes cleaned at random: they do so when they want to draw a line under the past, when they hope that an outer transformation may be a spur to an inner one. With no ill will, nor any desire to taunt me, he would daily assure me that if he ever got around to putting his experiences down on paper, his would be the most fascinating book about an airport that anyone had ever read.
    12 Just past Dudley’s workstation, off a corridor leading to the security zone, there was a multi-faith room, a cream-coloured space holding an ill-matched assortment of furniture and a bookshelf of the sacred texts.

    I watched a family from southern India coming to pay their respects to Ganesh, the Hindu god in charge of the fortunes of travellers, before going on to board the 1.00 p.m. BA035 flight to Chennai. The deity was presented with some cupcakes and a rose-scented candle, which airport regulations prevented the family from actually lighting.
    In the old days, when aircraft routinely fell out of the sky because large and obvious components failed – the fuel pumps gave out or the engines exploded – it felt sensible to cast aside the claims of organised religions in favour of a trust in science. Rather than praying, the urgent task was to study the root causes of malfunctions and stamp out error through reason. But as aviation has become ever more subject to scrutiny, as every part has been hedged by backup systems, so, too, have the reasons for becoming superstitious paradoxically increased.
    The sheer remoteness of a catastrophic event occurring invites us to forgo scientific assurances in favour of a more humblestance towards the dangers which our feeble minds struggle to contain. While never going so far as to ignore maintenance schedules, we may nevertheless judge it far from unreasonable to take a few moments before a journey to fall to our knees and pray to the mysterious forces of fate to which all aircraft remain subject and which we might as well call Isis, God, Fortuna or Ganesh – before going on to buy cigarettes and Chanel No.5 in the World Duty Free emporium on the other side of security.

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