Back To Earth

The Norman Foster architecture at Stansted has always been my favourite of the so-called “London” airports.
I’ve never had the opportunity to fly from London City, which is geographically closest to me but tends to deal only with business flights. I can’t take London Luton seriously – I knew it when it was just plain old Luton Airport. UK readers of my generation will probably remember – or are maybe still trying to forget – Lorraine Chase’s “naah, Luton Airport” Campari advert and the Luton Airport song by Cats UK.
London Heathrow undoubtedly has the best atmosphere and the most cosmopolitan buzz, but it’s a pig to get to from South East London. As for London Gatwick… well, it’s convenient if you’re south of the river and can persuade yourself to view its endless corridors, lifts, escalators, walkways and twisted signage as some kind of character-building endurance test. (Please tell me that its use as an airport is purely secondary; no one would have designed a passenger terminal to work that way, surely?)
Stansted at 6:30am this morning was already busy, though given the hour people were moving more sedately than usual. The sun had risen at around six o’clock and thirty minutes later its rays were streaming magnificently and almost horizontally through the airport’s massive glass and metal structure, to the extent that sunglasses were required merely to find the check-in desk.
It was, literally, fantastic: a gateway to a parallel universe, a muted spaceport in a valium dream, intrepid travellers bursting free from the confines of their lives to explore who knows where. I fell into a reverie, visualising the human condition as a stream of infinite choices – Patti Smith’s “sea of possibility”, maybe – with each individual surfing the waves of existence, fearless, heroic and…
“NAAH, AH’VE GOT TER WAIT FER SANDRA, SHE’S IN THE TORR-LET…”
I hope the inventor of the mobile phone is burning in the eternal flames of hell.