Hard Day’s Flight

Sure, big airports are a big nuisance—but travel wasn’t meant to be easy. Chin up and light out for the territories, says Steve King.

Travel—if you accept that travel involves getting somewhere beyond the red letterbox on the corner—has always been a pain in the neck. A walk in the park? Never. That’s what you do once you’ve done the travelling part.

Until the advent of the steam engine, travelling anywhere that wasn’t within walking distance was expensive, slow, uncomfortable and quite possibly dangerous. Of course, it still feels like all of those things when your flight out of Heathrow is delayed for the third time, or summarily cancelled, or the fat guy in the seat next to yours begins to wriggle and whistle tunelessly through his teeth 20 minutes into a fully-booked 12-hour flight to Hong Kong.

Alas, there’s nothing new about delays, cancellations or unsympathetic travelling companions. You could have been the grandest of 18th-century nobs setting off on the grandest of Grand Tours and nevertheless found yourself stuck next to a wriggling, whistling fatso in a cramped coach-and-four for 12 hours. What’s more, you’d have only made it to Hastings at the end of your ordeal.

So, really, when we moan about the misery of travel today, we’re moaning about the loss of something we never had. It was never easy. A certain amount of ghastliness is part of the deal. You travel, you suffer. But since blaming other people for the things that spoil our sense of entitlement is one of the privileges of our species, who are we to blame for this?

Film-makers, I suspect. Travel always looks better in the movies. Oddly, it doesn’t seem to matter what happens on the way, either. We forget that Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper’s chopper-straddling hippies get blown away by rednecks at the end of Easy Rider. We still want to ditch our square jobs, rev up a Harley and hit the road. We forget that Peter O’Toole’s Lawrence of Arabia has been burnt, buggered and beaten with sticks before he arrives—splendidly, ecstatically, to the strains of a symphony orchestra—at the beach at Aqaba. We still want to book a camel safari. Murder on the Orient Express? No worries! Death in Venice? Whatever!

Sadly, the notion of frictionless freedom, of travel without inconvenience, is a fantasy. Understandably, there’s a temptation just to cancel that trip, forgo the Terminal 5 nightmare, stay at home, fire up a reefer and watch Easy Rider again. Surely better, though, to show a bit of backbone and head out into the great unknown—even if that means risking a dreary couple of hours at an airport, or a stout rogering by Turkish soldiers, or any of the other character-building experiences that await the undaunted traveller.

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