Waiting and waiting

How do you stand when you are waiting for a person at an airport?

Bristol airport, very carefully, doesn’t provide seats at the ‘arrivals’ gates, so you have to stand and wait. There are possibilities: there is a cylindrical air conditioning unit of perforated metal anchored to the floor and available for leaning against; there is a rail blocking waiting persons from entering the ‘arrivals’ gates, which had the added advantage of being leanable and also providing a foot rest at the same time; there are walls for slouching against; a WHSmith spending the time (founding an expensive tradition) by choosing and then buying books while you are waiting, and, of course, there is the coffee shop. Which has chairs. For the sitting upon. But coffee in airports is infamously, ruinously, disgracefully expensive. How much is one prepared to pay for a chair? Surely not the price of a mildly flavoured paper cup full of hot water? There is an alternative: just sit there.

Now you have to understand that British people (my sort of people) do not actually like getting something for nothing. Generations of poorly understood versions of the Puritan Work Ethic have ingrained themselves in the soul of the ordinary person and, in spite of the fact that we know that we are being ripped off by commercial organizations on a fairly constant basis; we do not like to take without ‘justification’. Or perhaps it is more that we don’t like to be seen to be taking without justification.

Which explains why I sat at a table in the coffee shop which had two empty coffee mugs on it; thus allowing me to sit and read my recently purchased book with something approaching impunity, though, god knows I must have looked pretty shady to the totally bored looking girl, who was squirting a spray in a desultory sort of fashion in a generalised direction of the top of the table surfaces. If she had registered her surroundings in any analytical way I might have been in some 'danger', but she didn't, so that was OK. I only sat there until the notice board stated that the plane from Barcelona had landed, so that was the signal for me to move and get nearer to the arrivals gate.

This is where the new tradition of always buying a book whenever I was in an airport came to the fore and allowed me to develop a new technique: leaning and reading at the same time and therefore not having to have the trauma of standing and waiting trying to look intelligent by reading and re-reading the arrivals and departures boards. The real problem is you have to look at something and there isn’t anything there to look at; apart from the closed door of the arrivals; you’re looking so fixedly at the door that anyone appearing from the other side is momentarily taken aback by the stare of expectation that they know that they cannot fulfil. It’s always nice to come home from holiday and the first feeling you have as you emerge back into the world of normality is one of inadequacy. But that’s what holidays are all about: disrupting your sense of ordinariness.

I suppose that I ought to mention something about the mismatch between the ‘narrative’ and the ‘illustration’.

Cardiff has built a new park by the side of the River Rumney: a sort of wetlands reserve. It has a gate with an ornamental sort of arch on which metallic outlines of birds are attached. It has a car park and picnic tables. It also has monolithic stones obstructing the entrance which is further obstructed by bolted gates. I’m not sure that the meaning of the word by the Cardiff Parks Department has exactly the same connotations as it does for me. You also have to bear in mind that we do not have the best opinion of the Department because of the persistent awarding of Second Prize for the garden when, quite clearly, it was worthy of more! Perhaps.

Anyway, there is a way into the park and this morning that is where I went. There was no one else and, apart from the traffic thundering by on three sides it was quiet. The only inhabitants in the park were the birds who, as soon as I started taking photographs began to converge on me. Luckily I remembered reading a book by Jacques Cousteau of his filming of a shark which was making a determined way towards him. He carried on filming and when the shark was upon him he hit it on the nose with his camera. Exactly the same thing happened to me with the phalanx of swans who made their way towards me. I kept on taking photographs just like Cousteau; the only thing that was different was that the swans turned away of their own accord and I didn’t have to attack them with my Casio! Lucky swans.

Tomorrow I intend to go even further afield.

Be afraid. Be very afraid!