Read A Week at the Airport for Free Online Page B

their refractions in the stories of the world’s religions. We have heard about too many ascensions, too many voices from heaven, too many airborne angels and saints to ever be able to regard the business of flight from an entirely pedestrian perspective, as we might, say, the act of travelling by train. Notions of the divine, the eternal and the significant accompany us covertly on to our craft, haunting the reading aloud of the safety instructions, the weather announcements made by our captains and, most particularly, our lofty views of the gentle curvature of the earth.
    4 It seemed appropriate that I should bump into two clergymen just outside a perfume outlet, which released the gentle, commingled smell of some eight thousand varieties of scent. The older of the pair, the Reverend Sturdy, wore a high-visibility jacket with the words ‘Airport Priest’ printed on the back. In his late sixties, he had a vast and archetypically ecclesiastical beard and gold-rimmed spectacles. The cadence of his speech was impressively slow and deliberate, like that of a scholar unable to ignore, even for a moment, the nuances behind every statement, and accustomed to living in environments where these could be investigated to their furthest conclusions without fear of inconveniencing or delaying others. His colleague, Albert Kahn, likewise garbed for high visibility – though his jacket, borrowed from another staff member, read merely ‘Emergency Services’ – was in his early twenties and on a work placement at Heathrow while completing theological studies at Durham University.
    ‘What do people tend to come to you to ask?’ I enquired of the Reverend Sturdy as we passed by an outlet belonging to that perplexingly indefinable clothing brand Reiss. There was a long pause, during which a disembodied voice reminded us once more never to leave our luggage unattended.

    ‘They come to me when they are lost,’ the Reverend replied at last, emphasising the final word so that it seemed to reflect the spiritual confusion of mankind, a hapless race of beings described by St Augustine as ‘pilgrims in the City of Earth until they can join the City of God’.
    ‘Yes, but what might they be feeling lost
about
?’
    ‘Oh,’ said the Reverend with a sigh, ‘they are almost always looking for the toilets.’
    Because it seemed a pity to end our discussion of metaphysical matters on such a note, I asked the two men to tell me how a traveller might most productively spend his or her last minutes before boarding and take-off. The Reverend was adamant: the task, he said, was to turn one’s thoughts intently to God.
    ‘But what if one can’t believe in him?’ I pursued.
    The Reverend fell silent and looked away, as though this were not a polite question to ask of a priest. Happily, his colleague, weaned on a more liberal theology, delivered an equally succinct but more inclusive reply, to which my thoughts often returned in the days to come as I watched planes taxiing out to the runways: ‘The thought of death should usher us towards whatever happens to matter most to us; it should lend us the courage to pursue the way of life we value in our hearts.’
    5 Just beyond the security area was a suite, named after an ill-fated supersonic jet and reserved for the use of first-class passengers. The advantages of wealth can sometimes be hard to see: expensive cars and wines, clothes and meals are nowadays rarely proportionately superior to their cheaper counterparts, due to the sophistication of modern processes of design and mass production. But in this sense, British Airways’ Concorde Room was an anomaly. It was humblingly and thought-provokingly nicer than anywhere else I had ever seen at an airport, and perhaps in my life.
    There were leather armchairs, fireplaces, marble bathrooms, a spa, a restaurant, a concierge, a manicurist and a hairdresser. One waiter toured the lounge with plates of complimentary caviar, foie gras and smoked salmon,