12.12.07

departure

Posted in politics at 7:50 am by Rob Fahey

Heathrow Airport, 05.30am:

Terminal 3, lonely and desolate, smells of fresh paint and carcinogen particles. Even at that, it’s a welcome respite from the graveyard shift talk radio show my taxi driver chuckled to the whole way to the airport. He laughed especially hard when the bitter, vicious sounding man presenting the show shouted that Rose West – and all other murderers – should be “strung up”.

Pressing the “cancel” button on the screen for selecting a new seat on the Scandinavian Airlines check-in machine doesn’t just cancel seat selection, it cancels the whole check-in and drops you back to the welcome screen. There’s an audible sigh from behind me; I glance around and meet the baleful eye of the sole occupant of the queue behind me. I have become one of those people; the people who spend endless minutes standing in front of cash points, leading me to wonder out loud if they’re trying to negotiate a new mortgage with the machine.

Heathrow Airport, 05.42am:

The only people who want to pass through to security at this hour are myself and a young German couple – both uniformly stunning, with sandy blond hair and deep golden skin, returning from a warm holiday in shorts and t-shirts while I scurry through the tail end of the December night in a warm coat and scarf. At the boarding card check, they are turned back by a woman with dead, disinterested eyes, because the simple breakfast they bought in the terminal – cereal and juice – includes milk cartons which are 125ml in size, and orange juice 150ml in size.

Two summers ago – one, if you rightly choose not to count this year’s unloved rainy season as a summer – the British government claimed to have foiled a plot to blow up airplanes using liquid explosives, which could be transported on board in bottles and mixed in the aircraft’s toilet to make a mid-air mess. Within weeks, every credible scientific or security authority had thoroughly debunked the theory; liquid explosives are too difficult to make, too volatile to carry, and impossible to combine to any great effect without special equipment.

It makes no odds to the politics of paranoia and fear. Over a year later, the net result is this; a 125ml carton of milk, which everyone involved knows is merely milk for cereal, bought at the airport itself, must be thrown away. A 100ml carton would be fine, but that 25ml, my friends, is the thin line between our safety, and a world of unstoppable terror. Oh yes.

Heathrow Airport, 05.48am:

The shoe scanner is another new line of security, introduced after yet another failed, stupid “terrorist” attack – a mentally disturbed, educationally subnormal man who tried to light a bomb in the heel of his shoe with a box of matches. Oh yes, Al Quaeda will be proud of that one. At the scanner, a bored looking woman pretends to focus on the X-Ray screen, but is clearly staring off into space somewhere behind it.

“Have a good afternoon,” a tall, silver haired American man with a lean face says to the woman. I wonder what time zone he’s working to, when he follows up by saying, “because it’s going to be a rough morning!” The girl smiles at him. I don’t think I’ve ever heard anything quite so sinister in my life. It could only have been improved if the man had actually been Nicholas Cage, and he’d slipped on some expensive sunglasses as he said it.

Heathrow Airport, 05.57am:

At the bagel stand in the departure lounge, someone has Michael Jackson’s “Bad” as their ringtone – loud. When it goes off, half the people in the lounge (about six) turn around suddenly to stare. My morning is brightened marginally (morning? Who am I kidding; sunrise is 7.55am today, according to the twisted talk show host from earlier. This is night.) by the idea that they’d anticipated seeing the King of Pop sashaying his way out from behind Bagel Street, possibly serenading a lightly steaming Philly Cheese Steak bagel.

There’s a yellowing plastic model of a Singapore Airlines jet hanging from the ceiling in the lounge, with cracks in its plastic visible even from here. If it banked slightly, it could fly through the LED departures board in a shower of cinematic sparks, before smashing into the hopeful grin of the attendant outside the overpriced whiskey shop, drowning his pre-dawn attempts to sell hard liquor in a shower of glass and Glenfiddich.

I suspect he would welcome death, since every day he listens to the non-stop squeak-squeak-squeak-squeak of Hamley’s vile, satanic mechanical dog toys, eternally pushing against the side of a box like brain-damaged livestock and squeaking at exactly the right pitch to inspire madness.

They’re calling my flight. I’m off to Oslo. Bet it’s cold as an Eskimo’s tit out there.

Technorati Tags: Heathrow, idiocy, politics, security, rant, travel

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