Friday 11 September 2009: Melbourne to Hong Kong - Airport and the End of the Idea

Airports and shopping malls are said to evoke the zeitgeist of the 20th century. The parallels in their contrariness struck me. We intend to enter shopping malls for a short periods only, but spend an age as we delight in an endless processing of material delights. Airports by contrast portend to offer speed, and instead put us through prolonged psychological torture.

And for some reason were are meant to delight in airports. The light and air of Norman Foster's Hong Kong airport - my destination - with graceful and pleasurable curve hiding from us fiendish complexity of systems in security, logistics?oh, and sewerage. But the most talented, cunning and evil of minds had already left their imprint upon the modern world before Norm' got there. Yes, the people that designed zer travel process.

Think about it. The basis point of the design is really a basic interrogation technique: good cop, bad cop. In good cop, bad cop the suspect never says a useful word to the bad cop, instead after a little roughing up, opening their soul to the good cop, leeching their secrets away. There are iterations of good, bad, good, bad, the bad sapping the will progressively until suspect is reduced to a being of no interest. Totally dehumanised. The founding principle of air travel is this very one. But whoever designed it was more malign - (s)he didn't stop at the basic GCBC. To design something so demonic with these refinements our person must have lived and observed a deeply cruel society, and must too have seen Chinese water torture. I figure it must have been a colonial Brit, a product of the savage English private schooling system, maybe in the 1930s, living in a warlord era China, observing the play-off being Nationalist and communist while invaders imposed ever more preposterous rule. Maybe airports were really invented by Somerset Maughan or JG Ballard.

So consider it. You enter the airport hours before the flight, and are lulled into a soporific boredom as you await the check-in counter to open. A flash of excitement ?check-in, then more boredom. Passing through immigration a rush of adrenelin. The boredom of duty free shopping being offered a selection of goods you never wanted but are forced now to contemplate as a prospective purchase might awake you from slumber. Shopped out you wait at the departure gate. Boredom. Boredom. (Fanfar) Joy of joy. The gate will open in 10 minutes. Can I contain myself? Some can't - they get too excited. They break the monotony of the lounge wait by getting up immediately and queue to get on the plane first, for the privilege of being in the sardine can of a plane for 9 hours and twenty minutes, instead of my 9 hours. Well done. Hell, I won't even have started on the in-flight magazine before they've gone stir crazy.

But the airport is a rarefied moment when you are forced to move from the enjoyment of the Idea or the Dream of the holiday, to having to deal with the Reality of the holiday. Often the Idea is better. I'd been variously enjoying and fretting on the Idea for my holiday since booking it 10 months earlier. Four countries - 'I'm jealous' say work colleagues sometimes sincerely, sometimes because that is what decorum mandates being said. A villa in France - aaah! London - eeeh! My first stop, Hong Kong seemed uncomplicated. Nice buzzing loud place, in a small flat, will eat lots and buy spectacles. Had stuffed up the flight bookings for Paris leaving us with only one day. But will be good to be there. Villa in Biarritz; all my family together - what a privilege. In regional France too. Great. Hope Mum brings a Scrabble set. Hope there are no arguments. Spain; un-fucking-believable Frank Gehry designed hotel in La Rioja, a wine region the produces my favourite wine in all the world, near the town of Logrono which has Spain's best tapas. And then there is England. England. Oh crap, the Idea of England does my head in. Spent 35 years of his life there, never disliked it, don't now. Actually quite liked it. But I'd totally lost between being tourist and doing something called 'visiting home' apparently as 'a native'. Has it changed, or have I? The prospect is actually quite confronting. What will the reality be? Dunno. Must admit to completely screwed in the head over it all. And we made the English stay too short. Thought the main point of the holiday was family time, and that was Hong Kong and France. England was meant to be short and easy. Meet the Croydon bunch one night and see if they give me a sledging over The Ashes or my accent, see our London friends another night, show Indigo Big Ben, Tower Bridge, British Museum and the London Eye, get bagels from Brick Lane and eat at Club Gascon. Go home to Australia. More people wanted a bit of us than we bargained for. In one sense we were charmed, but maybe on the precipice of keeping nobody happy in trying to keep everybody happy. Just prior to leaving we changed plans. Our four days in London have been halved as wee now driving up to Yorkshire. Actually can't wait for my mum's roast beef, and my dad's lasagne

So here in the airport lounge the idea of the holiday dies, and I go forth to meet my reality.

Post Scriptum: The Flight
Guess what, Pat insisted we use the opportunity afforded to us by having a Indigo with us of being able to board the place especially early so that it is we that are now the suckers who stayed in our sardine seats an extra half hour more than everyone else :(

A brief tour of the features of the plane suggested several reforms mostly in gadgetry. However, one feature that that stayed the same was my abject ability to get one wink of sleep on an overnight long haul flight. I did manage 2 hours within the 9 hour flight. I'd taken my new PMP player and having listened to some of Bach's cello concertos, watched Waltz with Bashir, an Israeli cartoon about a man who could not remember his involvement as a soldier with the massacres at Sabra & Shatila. The ending was very moving indeed. My eyes filled with tears. The well of emotion was broken as Indigo power-vomited next to me.