Saturday, December 23, 2006

Stansted Airport yesterday







i feel there's been a tremendous buildup to...nothing much. christmas. calculating how many billion pounds peoople will spend in an hour. you must do this, you must do that. it's nice to go home. everyone comes together for this one off thing. and then the fog descended... sitting in the stansted express with too many other people and their luggage looking out of the window into this sinister thick fog grinning back at me, i thought, i don't actually want to fly, i don't want to be here. i'm only flying because, why? it's convenient. i wouldn't go home probably if i couldn't fly. it's what everyone else is doing. anyway, my flight got cancelled. lots of peoples flights got cancelled, lots of flights to Germany. Stansted was total chaos, people trying to book other flights into Germany. there were no more flights before x-mas, everything was full already. Denied. Fog. Security. Sitting on the bus back to Golders Green with about four other people, a lot of space around me, looking into the fog again, going back to London i felt relaxed for the first time all day. I actually like that fog, reminds me of certain corners of my head, haha. I took some little videos of the chaos though. Nothing major or dramatic, just the general sense of confusion. reminds me of that Tati film we love, Playtime, the absurdity of the modern world, of travelling, of that whole airport scene gone slightly out of control. Morrissey said something recently about not liking flying because you can't be yourself anymore, you give up any sense of personal freedom or space when you enter an airport, it's do this, do that, queue here, etc. and yeah, even though i would have loved to go home i was okay not flying yesterday. i'll go in january when all this has calmed down. my parents want to take me to the mountains instead, so that's all cool, hopefully. merry x-mas!

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Sorry you didn't make it home. We got to Berlin eventually by alternate means, but took a while, & some cash, but we got here. Vanessa got sick after a day though. Seems to be better now though.

Merry Xmas

thomas said...

oh. you did? merry x-mas to you and V too, Sir. So your flight got cancelled as well??? ughhhh, sorry to hear all that. yeah, it was so horrible in Stansted already I really couldn't be bothered to check out alternate means to get home. All the flights were full anyway! I overheard people saying that they should get to the ferries as soon as possible now, and I was thinking, well, it took me some considerable stress just to get to Stansted and I really wouldn't want to face much more of this x-mas travel chaops. so it was okay to go home here in London anyway, we celebrated here in our house. So anyway, hope you're still having an amazing time in Berlin and hope that Vanessa gets better soon...seeya!