Free A Week at the Airport by Alain de Botton Page B

to be a murderer or athief. The hour and a half of stillness would be punctuated only by the occasional electronic command to turn left or right at the next junction, until the Mercedes reached a glass-fronted office building in Canary Wharf, where Chris was due to attend a meeting on the storage of financial data and Mohammed returned to the terminal to begin another journey, this time to Kent, with the no less mysterious or more talkative Mr K from Narita.
    7 Many of the more conventional reunions seemed to beg the question of how their levels of excitement could be kept up. Maya had been waiting for this moment for the previous twelve hours. She had had butterflies since her plane crossed the coast of Ireland. At 9,000 metres up, she had anticipated Gianfranco’s touch. But finally, after eight minutes of a sustained embrace, the couple had no alternative: it was time for them to go and find his car.
    It seems curious but in the end appropriate that life should often put in our way, so near to the site of some of our most intense and heartfelt encounters, one of the greatest obstacles known to relationships: the requirement to pay for and then negotiate a way out of a multi-storey car park.

    Then again, as we strain to remain civil under the unforgiving fluorescent lights, we may be reminded of one of the reasons we went travelling in the first place: to make sure that we would be better able to resist the mundane and angry moods in which daily life is so ready to embroil us.
    The very brutality of the setting – the concrete floor marred with tyre marks and oil stains, the bays littered with abandoned trolleys and the ceilings echoing to the argumentative sounds of slamming doors and accelerating vehicles – encourages us to steel ourselves against a slide back into our worst possibilities. We may ask of our destinations, ‘Help me to feel more generous, less afraid, always curious. Put a gap between me and my confusion; the whole of the Atlantic between me and my shame.’ Travel agents would be wiser to ask us what we hope to change about our lives rather than simply where we wish to go.
    The notion of the journey as a harbinger of resolution was once an essential element of the religious pilgrimage, defined as an excursion through the outer world undertaken in an effort to promote and reinforce an inner evolution. Christian theorists were not in the least troubled by the dangers, discomforts or expense posed by pilgrimages, for they regarded these and other apparent disadvantages as mechanisms whereby the underlying spiritual intent of the trip could be rendered more vivid. Snowbound passes in the Alps, storms off the coast of Italy, brigands in Malta, corrupt Ottoman guards – all such trials merely helped to ensure that a trip would not be easily forgotten.

    Whatever the benefits of prolific and convenient air travel, we may curse it for its smooth subversion of our attempts to use journeys to make lasting changes in our lives.
    8 It was time to start packing up. In the connecting corridor leading to the Sofitel, I was intercepted by a fellow employee of the airport who was conducting a survey of newly arrived passengers, gathering their impressions of the terminal, from the signage to the lighting, the eating to the passport stamping. The responses were calibrated on a scale of 0 to 5, and the results would be tabulated as part of an internal review commissioned by the chief executive of Heathrow. I questioned the unusually protracted nature of this interview only in so far as it made me think of how seldom market researchers, with access to influential authorities, ask us to reflect on any of the more troubling issues we face in life more generally. On a scale of 0 to 5, how are we enjoying our marriages? Feeling about our careers? Dealing with the idea of one day dying?

    I ordered my last commercially sponsored club sandwich in the hotel lounge. The planes were particularly loud as they passed overhead –