i loathe flying.
i loathe airports, i loathe planes, i loathe taking off and landing, and i loathe the sadistically closely-packed horrifically uncomfortable bum-numbing instruments of torture that they try to pass off as "seats". i loathe the fact that although the "arrive 3 hours early, supposedly for security reasons, but really so we can make you wait around for two hours and 50 minutes at LEAST" rule makes it materially pretty much impossible to miss your flight unless you actually go out of your way to miss it on purpose, i STILL worry about this starting hours in advance. i loathe the fact that despite travelling with a book and usually more than one, i am usually too distracted / worried / nervous to enjoy it and am often reduced to staring mindlessly into space / at passersby, punctuated by frequent verifications that yep, it's almost a full minute later than it was the last time i checked.
i also loathe the hours upon hours of my life i have to waste sitting around airposts waiting to board, especially when the plane is delayed. i will never get those hours back ! i have not found a single airport to redeem the others (although, admittedly, i have not visited very many). i changed planes in heathrow a year and a half ago and it gave new meaning to the first few paragraphs of "the Long Dark Tea-time of the Soul" (Douglas Adams), which opens in Heathrow.
Quote:
It can hardly be a coincidence that no language on Earth has ever produced the expression "as pretty as an airport". Airports are ugly. Some are very ugly. Some attain a degree of ugliness that can only be the result of a special effort. This ugliness arises because airports ane full of people who are tired, cross, and have just discovered that their luggage has landed in Murmansk (Murmansk airport is the only known exception to this otherwise infallible rule), and architects have on the whole tried to reflect this in their designs.
They have sought to highlight the tiredness and crossness motif with brutal shapes and nerve jangling colours, to make effortless the business of separating the traveller for ever from his or her luggage or loved ones, to confuse the traveller with arrows that appear to point at the windows, distant tie racks, or the current position of Ursa Minor in the night sky, and wherever possible to expose the plumbing on the grounds that it is functional, and conceal the location of the departure gates, presumably on the grounds that they are not.
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i will say this for heathrow, it did have hobnobs. although, in typical airport fashion, you could not buy the regular classic hobnob, but only the "snack sized" mini hobnobs with chocolate. i prefer the classic ones.
i am mostly afraid of the taking off and landing bits. once in the air i usually calm down somewhat (not completely though... but i think it wears off a bit out of the sheer tedium of being stuck there for so damned long). but during the take-off and landing bits i have to clutch the armrests and concentrate on taking deep breaths to keep calm.