Business Traveller

In August, Tony Parsons spent a week at London Heathrow as its second writer-in-residence. The result, a short story collection named “Departures”, came out today

In an idea devised by the lateral-thinking people at Mischief PR, in 2009 Alain de Botton penned non-fiction A week at the Airport: A Heathrow Diary. With a Ballardian, infrastructure-fetishist relish, de Botton wrote movingly of the 65.7-million-passengers-per-year airport’s glazed surfaces and giant potted vegetation, and the people rushing around them.

For those who read A Heathrow Diary, it’s now impossible to see an air-bridge connecting to an aircraft without remembering this description: “A passenger walkway rolled forward and closed its rubber mouth in a hesitant kiss over the front left-hand door.”

Parsons, who became a fan of such places after reading Airport by Arthur Hailey, had a slightly different brief; he was to write a book capturing some of the stories and emotions of Britain’s biggest airport – then dramatising them. As with de Botton, Heathrow provided Parsons with the freedom to visit all areas of the airport to better understand the lives and routines of his potential characters.

In a statement, Parsons wrote of his experience: “There’s something both magical and majestic in the way that airports allow us to connect to the world in a way that would have been unfathomable to my parent’s generation.”

Wearing his novelist hat (the author of Man and Boy is also a columnist for British tabloid the Daily Mirror and GQ magazine) Parsons has produced a collection of heartwarming pieces surrounding facets of airport life. So heartwarming that at times I thought I was reading a children’s book – these are simple but evocative pieces cannily incorporating the many intriguing goings on that spending a week in this dust jacket-described “secret city” would make one privy to.

We meet afraid-of-flying Zoe and Fire-Officer Mike, brought together so one can persuade the other that they’re unlikely to be burned to a crisp inflight. I almost welled up reading about Tim Brady of the Heathrow Animal Reception Centre and his dealings with smuggled exotic animals: You may think twice about air-freighting your dog long-haul after this one.

But I was most engrossed with the chapter starring Jaswinder ‘Jazz’ Smith of the UK Border Agency. Checking passports in the Non-EU Nationals Queue, Jazz, who “always got the nutters,” doesn’t like being lied to. Find out what happens to those that try.

Departures isn’t challenging reading, but even those travellers who spend far too much time in airports have little knowledge of their inner workings. They would therefore benefit from this bite-sized tome – though perusing it may only last one boarding-gate wait.

Departures is available from October 27, published by HarperCollins.