Night flight from DXB via Amsterdam to Stockholm.
I am in the grey zone between midnight and day. Miraculously, sleep was achieved on the plane (due in part to colossal physical exhaustion and partly to alcohol) so I am not quite the walking dead that I would usually be at this hour...
In fact I have been awake for at least two hours or more - having consumed a fairly average airplane breakfast and the extremely good new Imogen Heap album "Ellipse" in that order... (I recommend the Imogen Heap album much more than the KLM breakfast.)
Airports are strange places at the best of times - sanitised microcosms (or not sanitised in the case of several airports I visit in Africa...) filled with transient life. Ephemeral in the extreme - and by definition.
But at this bizarre hour that is neither night nor day, the airport becomes a ghost town of parody.
As I walk through "airport land" I notice the different places on the ursatz Main Street that wants us to think we're in a small town somewhere - instead of in a series of concrete and steel tunnels in the middle of nowhere that lead to getting on a giant cigar tube filled with swine flu and other people's farts that will somehow defy gravity and other commonly held principals of physics and whisk us to another spot on the planet.
The Bombay Sapphire Bar - resplendent in blue and empty - for no-one, not even the Dutch, drinks gin at 5am.
The store selling sunglasses in the middle of the night when all is dark outside.
The flower shop selling both blooms and bulbs - because I needed to cultivate my own field of tulips...
The lounge playing softly piped elevator music - I'm listening to Daniel by Elton John right now. It could be worse (maybe) - it could be Daniel played on the pan pipes by Peruvian accountants on their away-day from the office...
Oh hideous plastic pastiche of life!
Oh charmless smile of a bored lounge receptionist waiting for her shift to end!
Oh nonchalant negligence of an immigrant immigration official employed only because they are an immigrant and for no other reason!
Oh sad man with laptop checking stock prices in the middle of the night in the middle of nowhere when he should be considering the middle of his life and taking stock of that instead!
Somewhere between midnight and day I am nursing the mid-life blues in an airport in the middle of nowhere and with no middle ground to run to.
Worst kind of blues are the blues before sunrise... And one of the worst places to have them is the airport.
But things are looking up already - the Bee Gees are on the music system in the lounge - "Night Fever" the disco classic.
Of course this song belongs in a dark and smokey bar somewhere after the fifth cocktail at around midnight and something, as the girl with the glint in her eye and the moral dilemma in her head looks across at you and you both wonder what the next hour will hold..."Night fever, night fev-err..."
It doesn't belong in an airport lounge just before dawn sitting next to an anally retentive Japanese executive with his own pencil case and a middle European house frau wearing a trouser suit that would have been a good fit 5 years previously...
No, no. That needs Daniel on the pan pipes...
Oh well - only another 30 mins before I get on another fart filled cigar tube and head north to Sweden - land of fresh air, expensive everything, Abba and nice fish.
Oh My GOD! In the name of Mary Jesus and Joseph and all other things that are Holy...
They are now playing Renee & Renata's 80's hit "Save Your Love"...
Kill me now.
