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Interview

Anecdotes of loss and desire

Alain de Botton: In the midst of arrivals and departures…

Writer Alain de Botton needs no introduction. His books have been bestsellers in 30 countries, covering travel, architecture and literature. His essayistic books have been described as a “philosophy of everyday life”. In summer 2009, de Botton was appointed London Heathrow Airport’s first Writer-in-Residence (a world first) and wrote a book about his experiences, “A Week at the Airport: A Heathrow Diary”, which attempts to capture the “inner workings” of one of the world’s busiest airports. In de Botton’s words, the airport is where you can see in action all the big themes that we otherwise know just as abstractions: the power of technology, globalisation, the environmental debate, consumerism, the frenzy of the modern workplace and the dreams of travel. The first 10,000 copies are distributed for free to Heathrow passengers. Excerpts from an exclusive e-mail interview…

A Week at the Airport: A Heathrow Diary, 2009, Alain de Botton, Profile Books, p.112, £8.99.

It was rare and unusual for a gigantic corporation like BAA, the owners of Heathrow, to have any time for a writer. I responded with an open mind to their invitation to come and spend a week, observing and writing about Heathrow. The deal we struck was that I should be able to speak to anyone about anything, and publish my words without interference. They took a gulp, but agreed.

It was a fascinating assignment. The real problem with airports is that we tend to go there when we need to catch a plane and tend not to look around at our surroundings. And yet airports definitely reward a second look — they are the imaginative centres of the modern world.

The setting was certainly rich in distractions. Every few minutes, a voice would make an announcement, for example, attempting to reunite a Mrs Barker, recently arrived from Frankfurt… For most passengers, I was simply a terminal employee and therefore a useful source of information on finding the customs desk or the cash machine. Those who realised my role found it more appropriate to consider the desk as an opportunity for confessions. I was approached by a man embarking on what he wryly termed the holiday of a lifetime to Bali with his wife, who was months away from succumbing to an incurable brain cancer. Another man explained that he had been visiting his family in London, but that he had a second one in Los Angeles who was ignorant of the first. He had five children and two mothers-in-law but his face bore none of the strains of his itinerary.

There were more permanent members of the terminal. My closest associate was Ana-Marie, the cleaner of my section of the check-in area, who wished very much to be in my book and often came to talk to me about the possibility, though when I suggested that she could without difficulty be included, she became troubled and insisted that she would have to have her real name and features disguised, for she had disappointed too many people back in Transylvania, where she had as a young woman come at the top of her class in the conservatoire and was widely thought to have achieved renown abroad as a classical singer.

The presence of a writer occasionally raised expectations that something dramatic might be on the verge of occurring, the sort of thing that one might read about in a novel. My explanation that I was merely looking around, and required nothing more extraordinary of the airport than that it continue to operate much as it did every other day of the year, was sometimes greeted with disappointment … My notebooks grew thick with anecdotes of loss, desire and expectation, snapshots of travellers’ souls on their way to the skies.

What makes good literature isn’t so much the novelty of the subject matter, as the approach. I have gone for a digressive, thoughtful, personally-flavoured essayistic style which will hopefully appeal to anyone who likes this sort of thing.

Television does things in a very particular way; and when it covers airports, it tends always to head for obvious conflict. For me, the challenge was to capture atmosphere and mood. For example, 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 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.

There was a lonely atmosphere but, unusually, it felt pleasant for being so general …

… Because the arrival of night typically pulls us back towards the hearth, there seemed something especially brave and admirable about those 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.

My star character is the head of British Airways, Willie Walsh. When I went to meet him, 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 … Considered collectively, as a cohesive industry, civil aviation has never in its history shown a profit. It seemed no less absurd to evaluate an airline according to its profit-and-loss statement than to judge a great poet by his or her royalty statements. In order to understand such things properly, I concluded that society would have to learn to look at airlines as one might consider a work of art.

I meet up with a family flying to Mumbai. They go into the faith room to light a candle to Ganesh though they are prevented from doing so by airline regulations. I was interested in their approach to technology. They were utterly scientific people, inhabitants of super-modernity, and yet they saw nothing wrong with paying homage to an ancient deity, just in case!

There was just the ordinary chaos of terminal life. Three people died when I was there. That’s a normal number for a week. One Cathay Pacific dug his wheels into the grass next to the taxi way. An Olympic airlines took the wrong turning on to a runway. Nothing fatal ... just ordinary human error.

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