For me nothing can induce the fernweh* like running a finger across a
map or standing beneath the electronic departure and arrivals boards of an international airport
as they tick over. This yearning doesn’t mean I like airports: the waiting, the
drudgery and the lack of national flavour combine to create an international
zone. Isolated from the real world outside, they are lifeless buildings that
trapped travellers have no option but put up with. Save the chance to buy an
overpriced Toblerone, the flight itself has little contextual interest for me
either.
Standing beneath the boards at
Gatwick Airport the Dennis Potter quote of London’s other airport runs through
my mind: “I did not fully understand the dread term ‘terminal illness’ until I
saw Heathrow for myself”. Doing some research online later, I couldn’t find a
single positive quote.
I’m at Gatwick but I’m not going
anywhere, waiting for the board to change ‘landed’ to ‘arrival’ to ‘baggage in
hall’, following the progress of my aunt somewhere before me. Staring fixedly at
the boards I was tempted by places from Guernsey to Bergen and beyond. The wait
got me to thinking just how many places I have been but not actually been, in
transit through airports and railway stations.
Never been to (red)…or have I?
I have failed to see the interior
of Cologne’s magnificent cathedral though I could see the gothic exterior from
the city’s station. I had no sense of what Zurich might be like despite having
arrived and departed from the city at least twice. I have been to Dubai but got
no further than the ugly fake guilt palms of the airport; and reached Johannesburg
without ever having reached the living city. I wanted to go there now, and see.
And that then is the point of our unloved airports, to make us consider, and
perhaps go and see, however we get there.