Looking at the gaps between posts, it is evident that it would be better to revert to posting every day. All this waiting for something interesting to happen has led to nothing interesting happening. But then, with me sitting on my sofa playing Zoo World on facebook, why would it?
On Thursday, my baby brother came back from China. Nick and I met him off the plane. I had never greeted anyone at an airport before. I feel that I may have missed out on one of life's key experiences, but I feel alright about it because I can't swim either. That is a bigger life experience to miss. I am unsure why I have never paced an arrivals hall before. It could be because my family are not globetrotting types (not true, both of my brothers have lived abroad since leaving Uni), or because we are cold and unwelcoming (maybe nearer the mark), but I think it is mostly because we are all independent types who don't expect to be collected from anywhere and looked after. This time, R had to put up with it. I sort of insisted, having watched a schmaltsy daytime TV thing where an interviewer records the goings on in airport departures and arrivals in a pass the tissues kind of way.
Heathrow terminal 5 at 4.50am is bright. Coming from a gloomy motorway morning, my eyes never adjusted to the glare off the white walls and shiny surfaces. It is said that airports all over the world are the same, and I don't doubt it. It was as if everyone was wiating for something not very exciting to happen. First to strike me were the men in untidy dark suits. They stood in three foot of territory that they had claimed for themselves, each carrying a laminated paper with words and numbers that appeared to be in some sort of code. Professional waiters. Men - all men - paid to wait on planes. No silver trays. It seemed to me that they must recognise each other, they probably work similar shifts each day, doing the waiting. Yet, they never spoke to each other, not even a nod of recognition between them. Unusually for people waiting, even though the waits were long and I never saw them collect anybody, they never had their phones out either, not even to text, or play solitare. Perhaps, like restaurant waiters, being seen with a phone, or with a mate, or with coloured socks is not the done thing.
If the waiters were visible, there was one man who had discovered the secret of invisibility. I was looking for things to look at, and yet it took me a good while to spot him. He was wearing a grey suit and was so still that he blended into the discrete grey booth behind him. He didn't lean on it, so the slight sway of his body gave him away when the light glanced off his lanyard. I kept an eye on him after that, hoping that this guardian of the borders would, in the blink of an eye, swoop in and pick off a straggler. There was no more movement though, even when a woman collapsed to the floor in an epileptic seizure. She was helped by a fluttering of red coated and lipped air stewardesses. There was no blood.
As still as the man from the UK Borders Agency, although paradoxically ultra visible, were the Arrived. This scruffy rag-tag of brown-ness were those who had arrived, but not yet departed. They slept stretched out on the chairs in and area that appeared to have been especially set aside for them. All were sleeping, or almost sleeping, or stretching towards sleep. I was reminded of a time in a Zoo where seals and sealions were housed together. In the twilight, the seals were sleeping in a loosely tumbled grouping, while in a place of their choosing a little removed, the sealions were awake, feeding and talking still. In the airport, the sealions were in the coffee shop. I wonder how long the Arrived waited, and what they waited for.
R turned up, dazed from a long flight. Had we not collected him, he would have become one of the Arrived, waiting for the National Express Coach. As it was, we took him to the coffee shop and then on to Cornwall. I gave him a sausage roll and the Guardian newspaper. You don't get either of them in China. The front page of the Guardian was devoted to the socialist Michael Foot who had departed. You don't get more of him anywhere.
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