What is is about airports and aeroplanes ? I’m trying to gather myself after a  first ever long haul flight. Two days in the paraffin powered dreamtime : three legs, sleeping in Newark airport, wide awake in Seattle.

There is something about crossing over to airside that means not all of you comes back. Days that were the same as nights in the blur of 24 hour shopping and surveillance. Everywhere that paraffin smell of jet fuel that reminds me unsettlingly of the stove that used to heat our flat in Manor Park and make petal flame shapes dance on the ceiling when I was a kid.     

Maybe it’s also to to with stretching of time, which can’t be stretched so it’s us that get pulled taut  instead. We are here, we wait, we wait more and then we are suddenly there, which is almost exactly like here was.  Most of us are anxious, except the shark suited business people who are all focus but no actual presence, like laser pointers. The only people who are familiar with the airside world are either bored or exploited. They sweep, sanitise toilets, wish a thousand strangers well every day or they check our shoes for explosives.    A really interesting  artist working in Alaska,  Bill Brody has a good word for arriving after a journey : decompression. I’ve been corresponding with him and hope to meet up and see his big panoramic woodcuts in their proper paper form. But most of all I want to stop feeling spaced out and get on with my work.  

I also will be asking him and the friend who I am staying with what in the world can eat the bark off a tree six foot above ground level in the yard outside. Needless to say this city boy that went on holiday by mistake stayed indoors for the first day.   

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