When I was at school in the 1970s, some of the richer kids would come back from their summer holidays with jaw-dropping tales about the wondrous places they had visited. Chief among them, as I remember, was Schiphol airport. ‘It was amazing,’ they would say. ‘There were shops and restaurants and stuff,’ and you could buy a Walkman for some insanely low price.
A few others vainly tried to trump the Schiphol crowd by fancifully claiming to have been to Frankfurt airport and seen an actual sex shop there — an assertion widely disbelieved, certainly by me, until I used the airport 15 years later and discovered it was perfectly true. (At the time the shop was called Dr Müller’s — Germans being the kind of people who like to buy sex toys from someone with suitable qualifications.)
For every trend, a counter-trend is waiting in the wings
Later on, the mantle for ‘amazing airports I have visited’ passed from Schiphol to Dubai and then Singapore. But, bit by bit, all major airports became like shopping centres. And more shopping centres sprang up, which became a bit like airports. The novelty of looking at £200 belts before catching a plane diminished. Instead people started saying things like ‘London City Airport is brilliant. You can just turn up 30 minutes before take-off, and you don’t have to traverse Bluewater before boarding the plane.’ I suspect an unspoken part of Ryanair’s appeal is the childish joy of using those tiny French rural airports where all you can buy is a coffee and a bag of Haribo but you don’t have to spend three hours in a Ballardian dystopia before a one-hour flight. Yet without the experience of large airports, we would think these small airports were rubbish.
The interesting thing here is that we don’t have actual preferences.
Comments
Join the debate for just £1 a month
Be part of the conversation with other Spectator readers by getting your first three months for £3.
UNLOCK ACCESS Just £1 a monthAlready a subscriber? Log in