Airports

On my 2 p.m. arrival for a week-long work trip to South Africa a fortnight ago, an immigration agent flapped my passport while inquiring as to the purpose of my visit. ‘To appear in the Franschhoek Literary Festival’ clearly meant nothing to this woman, but hey, lit fests aren’t exactly Glastonbury. I only grew, shall we say, concerned when she announced that because my passport lacked two sequential completely clean pages, she was denying me entry to the country. ‘You’re kidding me,’ I said – quietly; I didn’t shout. Yet this reflex expression of disbelief was all it would take for the entire team of Cape Town’s gatekeepers to blackball

The Colston chronicles Who, exactly, was Sir Edward Colston? Colston was born into a family of merchants and spent the first years of his career working for his father, trading cloth, wine, sherry and port around the western Mediterranean and North Africa. In 1680 he joined the Royal African Company which had been set up 20 years earlier by the Duke of York, the future James II, initially to exploit gold reserves in west Africa. In the 1680s it moved into the slave trade. Colston served one year as deputy governor of the company (the governor being James II). Colston also owned 40 of his own ships. He left the

My first award for intelligent design this week goes to Dublin airport for displaying a sign which reads ‘Lounges. Turn back. No lounges beyond this point.’ It may seem like a trivial thing, but it takes a rare intelligence to think in this way. It’s one thing to put up a sign that says ‘Lounges, this way’. But it takes nous to think ‘yes, well and good, but what happens if people see the first sign but miss the second one?’ In all likelihood, they would end up walking 500 yards in the wrong direction, as I nearly did. Signage and wayfinding are mostly designed for people who never make

One fairly reliable rule of thumb is ‘never buy anything at an airport if you can help it’. Something about the peculiar atmosphere of airports makes people act in strange ways. I used to find myself buying plug adapters simply because they were a slightly different colour from the ones I already had in my bag. Other people seem strangely eager to buy giant Toblerones.-Lufthansa once even asked scientists to investigate why in airport-lounges and on aircraft, people became far more disposed to drink tomato juice than anywhere else. Finally, and most baffling of all, who the hell buys luggage airside? Buying a suitcase before you go through security might

I’m baffled by the reaction to Zac Goldsmith’s decision to resign as the Conservative MP for Richmond Park. It is being interpreted, even by MPs on his own side, as an act of opportunism, a chance to rehabilitate himself with the metropolitan elite after his bruising defeat in the London mayoral election. Surprisingly few people seem willing to entertain the idea that he might be acting on principle. Exhibit A in the case for Zac’s defence is the fact that he’s the MP for Richmond Park in the first place. Zac could have applied to be the candidate in any number of safe Conservative seats in 2010 and, given his

Any day now, the government will make its long delayed announcement on whether a third runway should be built at Heathrow or Gatwick. Personally I am against both. During my 18 undistinguished months as an environment minister, I learned one thing about the aviation lobby: their appetite is voracious. They want more of everything. Runways, terminals, you name it. I also learned that in the end, often after initial resistance, governments always give way. Although from time to time industry representatives hint that they would be prepared to make concessions on the handful of night flights that come in over central London each morning, disturbing the sleep of several million

Two books to recommend to my fellow transportation nerds: Travel Fast or Smart? A Manifesto for an Intelligent Transport Policy by David Metz, formerly chief boffin at the Department for Transport; and Are Trams Socialist? Why Britain Has No Transport Policy by Christian Wolmar. The first is excellent throughout, the second is excellent right up to the final pages when, as many British transport commentators are liable to do, Wolmar rhapsodises about European approaches to city planning with their ‘bicycle superhighways’ and, yes, those bloody trams. You know the kind of thing: ‘In the Norwegian port of Slartibartfast, all cars are banned from the city centre before midnight, and the

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

‘This is a government that delivers,’ declared David Cameron in a speech on Monday. It’s a good thing he wasn’t announcing the launch of a pizza delivery firm, as tonight’s announcement on airport expansion suggests that the food would be stone cold by the time it finally arrived. After initially saying they’d make a decision on the Davies Commission by the end of this year, ministers this evening proudly announced that they have decided to delay making the decision until at least next summer. In statement, the Transport department said: ‘The Government has accepted the case for airport expansion in the south-east and the Airports Commission’s shortlist of options for