Heathrow Stories

Some lovers were parting. She must have been twenty, he a few years older. Haruki Murakami’s Norwegian Wood was in her bag. They had oversize sunglasses and had come of age in the period between SARS and swine flu. They were dressed casually in combat trousers and T-shirts. It was the intensity of their kiss that first attracted my attention, but what had seemed like passion from afar was revealed at closer range to be unusual devastation. She was shaking with sorrowful disbelief, he was cradling her in his arms, stroking her short blonde hair, in which a hairclip in the shape of a tulip had been fastened. Repeatedly, they would look into each other’s eyes and then, as though thereby made newly aware of the catastrophe about to befall them, she would begin weeping once more. ... People were passing and evincing sympathy. It helped that the woman was extraordinarily beautiful. I missed her already.... We might have been ready to offer sympathy, but in actuality, there were stronger reasons to want to congratulate her for having such a powerful cause to feel sad. We should have envied her for having located someone without whom she so firmly felt she could not survive, to the gate let alone to a bare student bedroom in a suburb of Beijing. If she had been able to view her situation from a sufficient distance, she might have been able to consider it as the high point of her life.

Philosopher and author Alain de Botton has become the first ever writer in residence at Heathrow Airport, writing his new book (to be called A Week at the Airport: A Heathrow Diary) live at Terminal 5, and incorporating passers-by into the story. It's an an appointment that Heathrow's management hope will create a positive buzz about the airport, and de Botton says :

That one of the largest organizations in the U.K. should take an interest in a book is almost quaint, like sponsoring a poet ... On behalf of my fellow beleaguered writers, it’s nice that writers seem to matter.

The book (an extract from which appears at the top of this post courtesy of The L.A.Times will be available at the end of September, and Heathrow will give away 10,000 copies to random passengers.

You can watch the BBC's report, with de Botton talking about the Heathrow assignment, on YouTube. Excursions to the airport are of course nothing new for the author, who has been taking groups of tourists there ...