All the Comforts of Home

JFK, 11.30pm (Eastern Standard Time). The neon clock (brought to you by Timex watches) tells me with almost spiteful glee that it’s 4am “back home”. I hate airports. They seem to heighten the feverish, surreal quality that goes with jetlag-inducing travel to frankly ridiculous levels. I shift uncomfortably in the made-to-measure, one-size-fits all plastic airport chair that’s nailed to the freezing floor. I check my watch, then curse as I realise it’s still on GMT. Ah, Greenwich, with its reassuringly real stenches of cars, pollutants and the Thames! Here in this man-made, carefully air-conditioned fishbowl the only smell you get is the one made by the industrial air coolants, whose heady aroma adds to the swimming feeling behind my eyes, making them water.

It seems even Americans, with their seemingly indefatigable energy for drive and change are not yet mad enough to uproot out of “semester” to go on holiday at this time of night. The only people about here are the cleaner, slowly swooshing his industrial floor-polisher back and forth, back and forth, and the occasional suit-and-tie business man, who scurries past, with only a brief nod to acknowledge the existence of a fellow sufferer. Every time one walks through the double automatic doors far, far away across the vast expanse of soulless marble flooring a gust of balmy air, hot and damp, whips in. This provokes, somewhere high above me, a computerised big brother to switch a mysterious switch to prevent any discomfort being caused to the traveller by the outside world. The night gust is swallowed up the night gust in a breath of recycled air.

The cleaner whistles; his machine hums. Behind me the empty baggage claim clicks, waiting for the morning and a new scrum of transfer passengers to Disneyland, or Europeans come to see the New World. But it's outside that the real noise is. Out there beats the heart of the American dream, a great beast that moves a continent along. Broadway, Wall Street, a concrete consumerist Mecca, stretches forever and forever and forever, out beyond the range of thought, and I am here as a pilgrim to this shrine, but I begin to doubt the deity to which it is built. Globalisation! It is thanks to this colossal concept that I am able to sit here and read the same magazines, watch the same looped music videos and listen to the same shops promoting the same offers that are available “back home”. But, if we are truly moving toward homogenisation, why do I feel alien here?

It is here, even in the red heart of the world, its pounding pulse pumping around the arteries of the interstates, that I feel most alone. The roads steam as the thunder of the tube ranges under them, as if the pressure of the great city needs a vent, a way out. I have come to brave the bear-pit of the stock exchange, to move amongst the steeples of the skyscrapers, but amid all this vastness that man has made I feel the need for insulation, for isolation from the noise and movement and change, forever change. I cannot keep up. I fall behind and feel the need to run to catch up, to understand, but I cannot, I cannot and I will not. I do not want, suddenly, to leave this airport, with its stillness, boring, boring stillness, glorious isolation, but I know I must. I must move on with the world. I must be taken to a hotel, which, the guide tells me, has “All the Comforts of Home.”