(((But I'm merely popping over the Adriatic for a summery week in Italy... nothing like the epic struggle here movingly detailed by
Adam "Everyware" Greenfield.)))
Link: Speedbird.
Tomorrow was (Let that be an indication to you how oddly this folded-under jetlag is hitting me.) Yesterday was one of the stranger days of my life, serving up equal portions of vaguely foreboding, Children of Men-esque unease and überswank jetsettery decadence.
The day began with a security delay at CDG terminal 2A (i.e. mine) that saw everybody in the terminal - passengers, cargo handlers, flight attendants, and all - herded into the area between concourses by unsmiling Police Nationale, as the EOD folks were called out to detonate a suspiciously unclaimed suitcase. After an hour or so of standing around, me getting increasingly pessimistic about my tightly-coupled Paris-NYC-Seoul itinerary, there was a dull crump, a wafting smell of cordite, a weird frisson of glee/terror rippling through the huddled and cranky crowd…and then the announcement that the detonation had sparked a fire, the terminal was closed, and there would be no further flights out.
You can’t even imagine the mass groan that greeted this announcement. “Animal lowing” doesn’t even begin to capture it - I’ve never before heard such a weird melange of profound (if liminal and barely-acknowledged) existential relief, and indignant irritation.
As it turned out, this was not in fact to be the case - operations resumed with surprising quickness - but the hours of delay felt unsettlingly like a preview of the unhappy decades to come. It was a Long Emergency moment, for sure, or maybe a scene from The Last of England: thousands of travellers of every conceivable age, nationality, ethnicity, and mother tongue, caught in between places. All waiting on a Ballardian onramp in the hot sun, surrounded by grim and heavily-armed police, amid carts overflowing with their possessions....
