It seems rather to depend on how long one has to wait. Speaking for myself, I appear to have turned up, with my usual precision and economy, about 3 hours early, denying myself another three hours of dreamless warmth and healing silence.
Still, there are compensations. One, a fateful sense that the smoothness of the journey so far has been purchased at the expense of my being so profligate with my time as to lavish it so opulently on the airport's strategies for people-flow in this manner. I've never walked up to an empty check-in desk before, for example.
For another, a sense of how familiar a country this is: the country of waiting. It's probably a timidity of spirit that makes me prefer it to rushing around, but I'd rather make the time to have time to spare than hare off to my appointments precipitously. And it does mean that one ends up twith all this blank time. There must be, I'm convinced, an art to enjoying this time, to spending it well. It helps, of course, to have something to do. Whether work or entertainment. Obviously I have my computer with me, which gives me access to all manner of useful and worthy things I could be doing. Which, of course, I will begin to do as soon as i decide I have finished this note. Another strategy is to take all that the departure lounge has to offer- from browsing amongst the available shops (there's no newsagent quite so appealing as an airport newsagent, not because of any special virtue- an unlikely prospect in this world of multinational, highest-bidder chainstore units- but on account of the hunger one acquires for reading matter under these circumstances. I wouldn't go so far as to admit to perusing automotive and angling magazines, but you inevitably get the picture. A note to self regarding duty free alcohol: buy gin on the way back.
And people watching. An overrated sport, I think. Perhaps it is my lack of penetrative insight, my insularity or selfishness, but I find the airport crowd uncolourful, stressed-out and obviously at the mercy of purveyors of overpriced croissants, huddled as we are on so many upholstered benches in need of a good scrub. (By this, I largely mean the upholstery needs a scrub, but one does see the occasional insalubrious specimen off of a long haul somewhere, the reek of timezone clinging to his (inevitably his, not her) flesh like the miasma of reheated food. It feels very much like hanging out in a sporting goods chainstore, though with more strident announcements. At least there are few televisions.
Looking ahead, I wonder how successful I will be in my efforts to make some sort of recording of my trip. I suspect that I will initially be reluctant to put together entries because I am tired, and later reluctant because I am spending more time doing things than recording them. Perhaps it will have to wait for a retrospective recording. At any rate I have the intention of making at least daily entries.
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