I have a theory that if there is a hell, it is not a place filled with scorching heat and unbearable pain, but rather a bland landscape filled with nothing but never-ending shades of grey and everlasting monotony.
I’m writing this in the Minneapolis International Airport during a tedious six hour wait for my next flight, while bitterly regretting leaving my laptop at home and cursing tiny touch screens.
Let me just tell you now, that six hours in an airport is harder to kill than you might imagine, once you’ve exhausted the cornucopia of brightly coloured store-fronts full of expensive local wares, chunky sweaters featuring knitted moose heads and state paraphernalia. Those harshly lit fast food places in the food court, especially designed to separate the weary traveller from the last of their change, are depressing and soulless, filled with blank-eyed travel zombies and overcooked fried foods.
Even watching shiny, majestic planes land and take off through the glass fronted wall of the food court, only occupies your mind for a few minutes before the tingling in your toes and the spreading numbness in your buttocks from the hard, wooden stools, makes you want to get the hell out of there to freedom.
A couple of laps of the concourse and a sniff around the designer goods in the alluring, yet ultimately disappointing, duty free store, under the hovering, oppressive eye of the duty-free-store-clerk-Nazi and you’ve pretty much exhausted your entertainment options for the rest of the day.
Airports are infuriating places if you’re travelling alone. Left to your own devices and desperately trying, out of sheer boredom, not to blow all your remaining finances on things that the next morning make you question your own sanity, a person can go mad just trying to stay sane.
With five hours left to kill and only a giant black coffee and some resolve left to fuel you, you wander aimlessly towards the empty bank of seats scattered around your leaving gate and sit down to read a book you’ve already read twice.
Which brings me to this.
Airports make you appreciate the sheer brilliance of whichever, probably quite insane, Chinese leader, instigated the “one family/one child” law. If you are child free and blissfully indifferent to people who are far too young to vote, a day in an airport will most likely drag you, hollering obscenities, right over the line of placid indifference and dump you firmly into the camp of “ban all children from public spaces until they are 14”. Because the only thing more infuriating than spending six hours in an airport is spending six hours in an airport surrounded by other people’s bored kids.
Whichever quiet sanctuary you carve out for yourself, to pass those last few hours before take off, be it a deserted gate, a carpeted corner or an empty corridor, know that annoying human entities of all ages will find you and infiltrate your serenity with their shrill protests, their fighting, their shrieking, their incessant cell phone conversations and ringtones of hip-hop songs that sound like they’ve been strained through a tin can. You will spend those remaining several hours praying fervently, despite your non-belief in any divine being, that none of those entities will be seated anywhere near you on the plane, yet sense, with a begrudging, tired knowledge, that they will probably turn out to be your row mates and that you will spend the entirety of the flight conjuring up imaginative ways to murder them.
Defeated, you will throw on your headphones, turn up the music and eye up the “Tequileria” place a few short feet from the gate, weighing up what your chances would be of still being permitted to board your flight after several super-sized margaritas and a fart-bonanza-inducing bean burrito.
In surmise, airports will suck out your very soul and fill the space with unending torture.
Whine over.
