Psychophant's Rants
24.9.15
Lost Wit
Most of us frequent travellers are quite familiar with the Gibson/Coupland image of soul drag when crossing time zones. Continental Western Europe, with its unified time zone, makes it fairly irrelevant, and it certainly makes my life easier. However in these months of frequent business travel, I have experienced something else, a kind of soul decay, or an erosion of the mental faculties as you spend time in a no-place, such as an airport.
Airports, as they are usually far away from most places, become just a stepping stone between two real places. However, from time to time, a badly timed connection or a cancellation, you end up spending long hours in such a place, usually not enough to justify the time and expense of visiting the neighbouring city, but enough to break your internal rythm. At least in my case I find it impossible to actually work in such circumstances, in a Limbo of suspended time, stopped, waiting for time to start again with boarding, with real movement and not the false movement of fake shopping and fake food. Because how few interesting things you find in an airport to buy, and how hard it is also to find interesting food. I said Limbo before, but the way most services treat you, it is almost as if it were Purgatory, and the awareness that you are always only a security officer whim away from real Hell.
Books are my usual escape in those cases. But with a tightly controlled baggage, and a busy business agenda, now it is not so common for me to pack more than one book. Years ago it was easy to find in most airports a bookshop and something readable, but nowadays it is mostly a few bestsellers and some glossy magazines, nothing with meat on it. So if the reserve book is no good, or over quickly, it is time for a long wait, with clocks getting slower as time stretches towards the moment of freedom, with the added difficulty that in an airport you can always get even more delayed, there is always that possibility that it can actually get worse.
Train stations are usually in the middle of a city, take a few steps and you are out, in a foreign but probably sane place, instead of the craziness of a post-security control airport waiting area. Then I think that what this reminds me of is a prison, and how I am, after all, lucky to be visiting for less than one day, instead of living inside day in day out. That probably explains the usually awful mood of those who work inside, effectively trapped in.
Easyjet canceled a flight from Barcelona to Basel on Monday morning, and the only way to get a solution was on a desk at the airport. No phone, no internet based solutions. No big trouble, as the cancellation warning caught me in a high speed train to Barcelona, anyway, so no other choice but to proceed to the airport. I was fortyish in the queue, but that was enough to exhaust the small number of alternatives offered. Being wise to the ways of the low cost, I had already gotten an alternative, but six hours and a half later. Therefore the wait, the boredom, the Belgian chocolate iced moccachino trying to bring up a pulse.
Third long wait in twelve flights, you start to feel dumber. So I am sorry for the previous rant. My wit seems to be lost somewhere in Terminal 1. ¶ 5:36 PM
Most of us frequent travellers are quite familiar with the Gibson/Coupland image of soul drag when crossing time zones. Continental Western Europe, with its unified time zone, makes it fairly irrelevant, and it certainly makes my life easier. However in these months of frequent business travel, I have experienced something else, a kind of soul decay, or an erosion of the mental faculties as you spend time in a no-place, such as an airport.
Airports, as they are usually far away from most places, become just a stepping stone between two real places. However, from time to time, a badly timed connection or a cancellation, you end up spending long hours in such a place, usually not enough to justify the time and expense of visiting the neighbouring city, but enough to break your internal rythm. At least in my case I find it impossible to actually work in such circumstances, in a Limbo of suspended time, stopped, waiting for time to start again with boarding, with real movement and not the false movement of fake shopping and fake food. Because how few interesting things you find in an airport to buy, and how hard it is also to find interesting food. I said Limbo before, but the way most services treat you, it is almost as if it were Purgatory, and the awareness that you are always only a security officer whim away from real Hell.
Books are my usual escape in those cases. But with a tightly controlled baggage, and a busy business agenda, now it is not so common for me to pack more than one book. Years ago it was easy to find in most airports a bookshop and something readable, but nowadays it is mostly a few bestsellers and some glossy magazines, nothing with meat on it. So if the reserve book is no good, or over quickly, it is time for a long wait, with clocks getting slower as time stretches towards the moment of freedom, with the added difficulty that in an airport you can always get even more delayed, there is always that possibility that it can actually get worse.
Train stations are usually in the middle of a city, take a few steps and you are out, in a foreign but probably sane place, instead of the craziness of a post-security control airport waiting area. Then I think that what this reminds me of is a prison, and how I am, after all, lucky to be visiting for less than one day, instead of living inside day in day out. That probably explains the usually awful mood of those who work inside, effectively trapped in.
Easyjet canceled a flight from Barcelona to Basel on Monday morning, and the only way to get a solution was on a desk at the airport. No phone, no internet based solutions. No big trouble, as the cancellation warning caught me in a high speed train to Barcelona, anyway, so no other choice but to proceed to the airport. I was fortyish in the queue, but that was enough to exhaust the small number of alternatives offered. Being wise to the ways of the low cost, I had already gotten an alternative, but six hours and a half later. Therefore the wait, the boredom, the Belgian chocolate iced moccachino trying to bring up a pulse.
Third long wait in twelve flights, you start to feel dumber. So I am sorry for the previous rant. My wit seems to be lost somewhere in Terminal 1. ¶ 5:36 PM
9.9.15
Icon, mine.
Icon and iconic have been overused to death. However there are some objects that still have that lasting fascination. I got one of mine.
When we travel we consider the shopping experience one of the critical parts of getting to know a culture. And we just like window shopping, and even some actual shopping. So in this last trip through Italy and France, we returned with loads of cheese, a dozen bottles of wine, sweets (mostly as presents for friends and family) some clothes, ceramics, a Murano christmas ball (my wife collects glass christmas balls), a Fitzroy barometer, a windowsill garden and a trench coat which probably costed as much as all the others together, except for my wife's own clothes purchases.
We went to one of those outlet/tourist trap places, and after going through a lot of outdoor gear that attracts me but I know I will never use, I went into the Burberry store. For the last thirty years I have wanted desired a classically cut trench coat. Never found a vintage one my size, though it is one of those things I look up when I am in London, and new ones are so expensive that it seems a crime. I have a long rain coat that has served me perfectly well for fourteen years (it appears in several board meats, from 2004 to 2014) but it just lacks personality.
Another factor is that several times that I have decided to try one, they never had my size, or it was in weird fabrics, or it did not fit well even when it was my size. I have a long trunk and relatively short legs, so that is an additional difficulty.
So, going straight for the discounted ones, and checking the available sizes, discarding nylon, jackets and others, there was only one candidate. Double breasted, which was very good, black, which although non-canonical is a practical color, and in a modern gabardine analogue instead of real gabardine fabric. It felt and weighed like gabardine but supposedly it is more water resistant. It made it slightly less iconic, but it also was the reason it was on sale, as the heritage classic series never get discounted. It was made in UK rather than Turkey, but as my best jeans are made in Turkey, that is not such a critical issue.
As the feel and weight was right, and it was at 50% (still an indecent amount of money, if I were not fairly convinced it would last the rest of my life), I borrowed a blazer (we were in the middle of a 600 km ride in summer, so I was wearing a t-shirt and jeans) which was also nice but non-iconic and more expensive than the trench coat, and tried all of it.
I do believe in love at first sight. This was another case. There are clothes that fit you, others fit your self image, and a few fit a better you, and make you feel better just by wearing them. This was one of those. We all knew. After some perfunctory checks (sleeve length, the neck fit with the hook and eye, belting over my belly), it was clear we were leaving with that coat. While filling the guarantee form, the salesman indicated that it was rare to have such a good body fit with one of the larger sizes.
Such a classic is full of obsolete or unusual remnants of the past, symbolism for those who know what it means, a kind of hidden historical code, from the D-rings in the belt to the epaulettes, the deep back yoke or the raglan sleeves...
Now I am wishing for a cold and wet autumn.
¶ 11:20 AM
