Airport

I used Heathrow Terminal 5 twice last week – outbound on day 4 and inbound on day 10 of the great airport disaster.  I was lucky – neither flight cancelled, no lost luggage, and only a couple of hours delay (because of baggage handling problems) each way but along the way I picked up a copy of the glossy 78-page A-Z Guide, which was produced for the opening of T5 – and which makes most amusing reading for connoisseurs of irony, given the thousands of passengers who were less fortunate than me with their T5 experience.

The A to Z listing goes from Architecture (‘nothing prepares you for the stunning landmark building that is Terminal 5’) to Zeitgeist (‘the spirit of the age – a word that sums up the vision, scale and beauty of Terminal 5’).  Unfortunately it doesn’t include hubris under H (of course not – ‘H is for Harrods’) or spin under S (with unbelievable irony ‘S is for Services’).

I wonder what all those people with cancelled flights think when the Guide suggests they ‘Be still for a moment and savour the extraordinary experience that is Heathrow Terminal 5’.  Or what all those people with lost luggage think when the Guide boasts that ‘the latest developments in baggage handling mean that your bags move faster than you do – to the right place’.  Or what everyone who’s noted the media coverage thinks when the Guide asserts: ‘Terminal 5 sets a new global standard for the airport experience’.  True indeed – but not quite in the way that the Guide was anticipating!

Under Z (for Zeitgeist you remember) I read ‘We hope you’ll keep this souvenir guide as a reminder of …. an amazing moment in history.’  Well I’d quibble about whether the opening of an airport terminal constitutes ‘an amazing moment in history’ (a claim repeated in large letters on the first page of the Guide) – particularly as I was travelling to and from Berlin which has had more than its fair share of genuinely ‘amazing’ moments in history.  But I hope everyone who has a copy keeps the Guide as a souvenir of the current English zeitgeist by which the language of marketing becomes ever more inflated as the actual functionality becomes ever more diminished.  Terminal 5 is, the Guide tells me, ‘a world-class experience’.  True indeed – England has become world class at talking cobblers while producing cock-ups on a globally iconic scale.