a week at the airport by alain de botton

“From our faith in technology to our destruction of nature, from our interconnectedness to our romanticising of travel…” “In a world full of chaos and irregularity, the terminal seemed a worthy and intriguing refuge of elegance and logic,” De Botton wrote. Oh yes… such a thought has flashed through my mind countless times during my frantic scramble towards the boarding gate.Īs the title spells it all out, this book is a documentation of author Alain de Botton’s week as a writer-in-residence where he ate, slept and worked all day long at Heathrow airport Terminal 5, stranded in a fashion like Viktor Navorski from “The Terminal.” “While punctuality lies at the heart of what we typically understand by a good trip, I have often longed for my plane to be delayed – so that I might be forced to spend a bit more time at the airport.” Taking the reader through the departures lounge, ‘airside’ and the arrivals hall, de Botton shows with his usual combination of wit and wisdom that spending time in an airport can be more useful and more revealing than we might think.After reading the first few lines of “A week at the airport” by Alain de Botton, I knew that it has hit my sweet spot. Working with the renowned documentary photographer Richard Baker, he explores the magical and the mundane, and the stories that inhabit this strange ‘non-place’ that we are usually eager to leave. He spoke with everyone from airline staff and senior executives to travellers passing through, and based on these conversations he produced this extraordinary account of life at an airport and what it says about modern existence.

In the summer of 2009, however, Alain de Botton was given unprecedented, unrestricted access to wander around Heathrow, one of the world’s biggest airports, having been appointed its Writer-in-Residence. We all spend longer than we would like waiting around in airports, but we rarely discover anything about our fellow travellers or those who work there.

A week at the airport by alain de botton