LEAVING ON A JET PLANE
Growing up in a working class family in the 1960’s flying was something exotic, alien, something for others, inevitably tinged with class. Flying was not for the likes of us. I remember the adventure of being taken by my grandmother to, what was then, Speke Airport in Liverpool to watch the planes take off and land. I remember the astonishment we felt that a woman was ascending the steps into the aeroplane still in her curlers, do women still wear curlers? It still surprises me.
Clive James once said something to the effect the moment you become blaze about flying you loose something. Flying of course being one of the most improbable of activities, you climb on board this great chunk of metal which all logic tells you cannot possibly get off the ground, but each time, wonder upon wonders, it does.
Not that when I was young we did not travel, no it was the train to Liverpool, or more exotically the ‘ferry’ to Belfast. You watched from the deck as the little hamlets and fishing villages along Belfast Lough slowly merged into the life of the city itself, as the ship shuddered and the gang planks lowered and we were greeted by my Uncle Sam, Jim or Stanley, or a combination of, shivering with a combination of excitement and cold in the chill air of a Belfast morning. Travel by ship now feels far more exotic to me than flying and I sailed twice across the straits of Gibraltar from Tangier, amongst the choppiest sea journeys in the world, I have always been proud of the fact the I don’t get seasick, just for the thrill of feeling the rise and fall of the sea, spray in your face as ‘The Rock’ slowly dominates the skyline. One of the pleasures of taking this organised tour was that included in the price was the flight back from Gibraltar, taking off from a runway that juts out into the sea, apparently one of the most difficult take offs in the world.
Now flying of course means airports and my relationship with airports has evolved over the years. At first airports were a place exclusively of the excitement, the poetry of departure, boarding card in hand, watching the departures board, Milan, Prague, Paris, Budapest, waiting for the flight to Moscow Sheramatov to change from Wait In Lounge. The departure screens in airports are always suggestive of a cosmopolitan freedom, create the illusion that you could suddenly change your mind. Well I’ve always wanted to visit Odessa, maybe I’ll go to Gate 54 instead!
But airports also involve arrivals, the heat that hit me when climbing out of the plane on arrival in Tangier, the rows of awaiting cubicles of passport control containing unsmiling border police. ‘Don’t smile,’ my guide to the USSR advised. Every time thereafter I think a little part of me felt, like Malcolm Lowry, that I would be turned back at the border.
Arrival at Boston Logan, was like arriving on the scene of a TV set, so that travelling into the city on the blue line metro felt both familiar and at the same time strange and new. Just as the bus ride from Sheramatov amongst the aging Soviet trucks belching clouds of exhaust fumes felt so strangely like arriving into the narrative of a contemporary eastern European novel. In the world of multi media and endless travel programmes places have come to reside, before they reside anywhere else, primarily in the mind. So that the Venice, Paris or New York that greets us collides with our internal preconceptions, expectations, to create wholly new syntheses and a new city, country or region is born in our mind. Thus I once wrote,-
‘Firstly I do not intend to write about Bulgaria, this adventure is set in Bulgaria, but it is not the Bulgaria, it is an inner Bulgaria, a Bulgaria, if you will, of the heart. If you try to seek out this country, you will not find it.’
And all the time the growing shadow of the return flight, the departure lounge. Departure lounges now become melancholy, places that became entangled for me with ever more painful separations, places of shuffling impatience and cold hard realities, barely made palatable by overpriced beer and undrinkable wine, I was going home………..
Return flights, departures, always began hours earlier with the dismal business of packing, re-packing the clothes folded so optimistically weeks, sometimes months before; the waiting luggage dumb accusing witnesses to your lack of fidelity to place, holders of unpalatable truths.
Leaving, a slow disentangling, a melancholy waltz, unspoken thoughts and feelings all leading to the disconnection before passport control and security, security a place of temporary scattering and re-assembling, until jacket shoes and belt are reunited and passport firmly re-inserted into jacket pocket, glass caged until released into the slender tube, the limbo state before being deposited ‘home,’ arriving in my case to the soulless purgatory of Luton airport.
Clive James once said something to the effect the moment you become blaze about flying you loose something. Flying of course being one of the most improbable of activities, you climb on board this great chunk of metal which all logic tells you cannot possibly get off the ground, but each time, wonder upon wonders, it does.
Not that when I was young we did not travel, no it was the train to Liverpool, or more exotically the ‘ferry’ to Belfast. You watched from the deck as the little hamlets and fishing villages along Belfast Lough slowly merged into the life of the city itself, as the ship shuddered and the gang planks lowered and we were greeted by my Uncle Sam, Jim or Stanley, or a combination of, shivering with a combination of excitement and cold in the chill air of a Belfast morning. Travel by ship now feels far more exotic to me than flying and I sailed twice across the straits of Gibraltar from Tangier, amongst the choppiest sea journeys in the world, I have always been proud of the fact the I don’t get seasick, just for the thrill of feeling the rise and fall of the sea, spray in your face as ‘The Rock’ slowly dominates the skyline. One of the pleasures of taking this organised tour was that included in the price was the flight back from Gibraltar, taking off from a runway that juts out into the sea, apparently one of the most difficult take offs in the world.
Now flying of course means airports and my relationship with airports has evolved over the years. At first airports were a place exclusively of the excitement, the poetry of departure, boarding card in hand, watching the departures board, Milan, Prague, Paris, Budapest, waiting for the flight to Moscow Sheramatov to change from Wait In Lounge. The departure screens in airports are always suggestive of a cosmopolitan freedom, create the illusion that you could suddenly change your mind. Well I’ve always wanted to visit Odessa, maybe I’ll go to Gate 54 instead!
But airports also involve arrivals, the heat that hit me when climbing out of the plane on arrival in Tangier, the rows of awaiting cubicles of passport control containing unsmiling border police. ‘Don’t smile,’ my guide to the USSR advised. Every time thereafter I think a little part of me felt, like Malcolm Lowry, that I would be turned back at the border.
Arrival at Boston Logan, was like arriving on the scene of a TV set, so that travelling into the city on the blue line metro felt both familiar and at the same time strange and new. Just as the bus ride from Sheramatov amongst the aging Soviet trucks belching clouds of exhaust fumes felt so strangely like arriving into the narrative of a contemporary eastern European novel. In the world of multi media and endless travel programmes places have come to reside, before they reside anywhere else, primarily in the mind. So that the Venice, Paris or New York that greets us collides with our internal preconceptions, expectations, to create wholly new syntheses and a new city, country or region is born in our mind. Thus I once wrote,-
‘Firstly I do not intend to write about Bulgaria, this adventure is set in Bulgaria, but it is not the Bulgaria, it is an inner Bulgaria, a Bulgaria, if you will, of the heart. If you try to seek out this country, you will not find it.’
And all the time the growing shadow of the return flight, the departure lounge. Departure lounges now become melancholy, places that became entangled for me with ever more painful separations, places of shuffling impatience and cold hard realities, barely made palatable by overpriced beer and undrinkable wine, I was going home………..
Return flights, departures, always began hours earlier with the dismal business of packing, re-packing the clothes folded so optimistically weeks, sometimes months before; the waiting luggage dumb accusing witnesses to your lack of fidelity to place, holders of unpalatable truths.
Leaving, a slow disentangling, a melancholy waltz, unspoken thoughts and feelings all leading to the disconnection before passport control and security, security a place of temporary scattering and re-assembling, until jacket shoes and belt are reunited and passport firmly re-inserted into jacket pocket, glass caged until released into the slender tube, the limbo state before being deposited ‘home,’ arriving in my case to the soulless purgatory of Luton airport.
