Hello from New York!
I arrived on Wednesday! Very exciting! I’m so jetlagged oh god!
First things first: for the next five weeks I’ll be sending out the newsletter a bit later than usual, as I really like my tradition of doing one last reread before sending it on Friday mornings, but obviously Friday mornings here are Friday afternoons in the UK. I hope you’ll be able to cope.
Secondly: it’s wildly cold here right now, which made me ask the woman I’m subletting from what the heating situation was going to be like in the flat, and she told me that I really had nothing to worry about. It’s a building from the 1920’s, meaning that there are some real chunky radiators everywhere and they turn on every morning at 6am and make the entire place unbearably hot.
The reason this all got built at the time was, apparently, that if you just made flats way too warm on purpose it’d force people to keep their windows open even in the winter, which would help keep out the flu and other diseases. I had no idea what was a thing! But I greatly enjoyed it as a fact. I hope you also did not know about it.
Anyway!
This week’s newsletter is quite bitty - I didn’t really have any big ideas for a proper column but did have a number of smaller things I wanted to write about so, er, here we are. Enjoy yer bits - some free, some for my darling paying subscribers, whom I love very much.
The case for the defence
I have a case to make! I think airports are fine. No, wait, I can go further: I think airports are neat, and I enjoy being in them way more than I like being in train stations.
I think time passes differently in airports, in a sort of subtle way you don’t always notice. Sometimes it stretches and sometimes it contracts; you know you have to arrive there two or three hours before your flight but you just can’t know how many hours it’s actually going to feel like.
There’s a rhythm to it too, which you maybe have to learn first but once you do it’ll feel like second nature. You’ve got to have your headphones on, and you’ve got to listen to some album you know by heart. It always helps to have a large beverage you can sip from at a leisurely pace. Ideally that beverage should be iced, not warm. I don’t know why. I didn’t make the rules.
You’ve got to walk around like you’re walking in jelly, relaxed and slow, and the real secret to liking airports is that, after that, you have to relinquish all control. Sure, food is going to be extortionate and so will drinks, but guess what? There’s nothing you can do about that, nothing at all.
You can either pay twenty pounds for something which would cost twelve on the other side of security or you can starve. These are your only choices. Of course you can decide to get angry about it but what purpose would it serve? You’re there now. You can’t leave. You can’t win.
If you choose to accept your situation you will also accept that the person you are at the airport is different from the one you are in real life. You can walk into shops you would never look at on the high street. You can order some fruity little drink you wouldn’t usually consider. You can buy trashy novels and even trashier magazines.
There are countless rules in an airport and, as a result, there aren’t really any. You will see people walking around dressed to the nines, and others looking like they stumbled out of bed and didn’t bother taking off their pyjamas. You will see feral families and haughty, tiny little women wearing large sunglasses.
All of life is at the airport, if you really look. They’re all here in this space that doesn’t really make sense, together, obeying rules that don’t exist in the real world. It’s a deeply soothing place to be in.
I’m writing this in Gatwick airport and I’m drinking a black iced coffee as large as a newborn baby. I’m listening to some old school Kanye West. I am the most relaxed I have been in a long time. I have surrendered. That’s the only trick, really: sometimes in life, you just have to surrender. Sometimes it is worth it. Maybe I’ll go buy some sunglasses from Accessorize.
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