Morning:
14°c
I couldn't be happier to learn the British Airports Authority is to have a few of its sweaty fingers peeled off the levers of control in the form of a forced sale of three airports.
I have practical reasons for this. The acreage of retail that blights our terminals is one symptom of BAA's hunger to serve its bottom line rather than its customers. These palaces of Mammon compete for space with public areas. They are built at the cost of adequate provision of comfortable seats in which members of the travelling public might sit quietly and eat the cheese sandwich they have brought in from home.
Then there are the immiseratingly bureaucratic security measures. I once had a keyring confiscated on the grounds that the inch-long plastic fob, in the shape of a pistol, was a "replica firearm" - before getting on the plane and being offered a working plastic model of a knife.
I also confess a personal interest. One of the smuggest men I ever met, at a party for the admirable charity Orbis, was a senior BAA executive. "Ah, another freeloading journalist," was his opening salvo. Which was true, of course, but bad manners. "Freeloading" was also true of him.
He then proceeded to run on about how we featherbedded hacks knew nothing of the cut and thrust of business, unlike buccaneers and risk-takers like himself. How buccaneering and entrepreneurial is it really, though, to make money out of a privatised monopoly?
Anything that flings mud in that bozo's eye is all right by me.
* Air travel is on my mind, anyway. I'm just back from Abu Dhabi, where I attended the International Prize for Arabic Fiction, or "Arab Booker".
The idea, Booker's Jonathan Taylor proclaimed, was to choose a prizewinner "regardless of nationality, religion, politics, gender or age". Since that includes all the most divisive issues in the Arab world, this was a tall order.
Nearly every speech stressed "integrity" and "transparency" - though paradoxically it was precisely to avoid suspicion of corruption that the judges' names were secret until the shortlist was announced.
The winner, Yusuf Zeydan, announced with splendid candour that the judges were "good friends of mine": "Because of this prize I was not able to have contact with them for many months."
You would never hear that at a British book prize-giving. The winner would likely be friends with the judges but he wouldn't admit it in public, and he certainly wouldn't have made it the occasion for scrupulously severing contact.
* Having long admired Halle Berry in human form, watching the sadly underrated Madagascar 2 on the flight was a revelation. Who knew a hippo could be so sexy?
Reader views (1)
Awwww don't you feel sorry for BAA......errr nope!
They deserve all they get after the way they have treated the residents in the Heathrow area.
At least the good people of Stansted and the environs have had schemes available to them to allow them to move on and plan their lives....something not afforded to the people around Heathrow.
BAA.... hypocrites!
Jim
- Jim Davies, Heathrow
