tunes. One rough-looking older gentleman close to me immediately has to take an incoming telephone call. He swears loudly. ‘Jaysus, who the hell is this? This call will cost me a fucking fortune, what with their roaming charges when I’m away from me home.’
There is an air-bridge when we arrive at the pier but we don’t use it, in line with this airline’s stated policy. ‘When we used Jet-Way airbridges, we found that they were the fourth largest cause of delays. Either the Jet-Way wasn’t there when we arrived, or the buffoon who was driving it was out by a few inches, and had to take the whole thing back and forth again before landing up at our doors. If it’s raining, people will just walk a little faster.’ It is sometimes necessary to take the Skytrain from the arrival gate to the Arrivals hall. This can be confusing for some travellers. I once arrived here on a flight, got on the Skytrain and sat beside an elderly Irish lady. She turned to me in the tiny train without a driver and asked, ‘Is this the Piccadilly line?’ Needless to say, I told her it was and if she stayed on board for the next fifty minutes, she would be in the West End.
Today I join the long march from the gate to the Arrivals hall, largely reminiscent of Napoleon’s retreat from Moscow in the winter of 1812, although fewer of us die from hypothermia, but some are picked off by snipers or succumb to the changing seasons, dysentery or the dreaded tetsi fly. My taxes and charges today include the arbitrary Wheelchair Levy, so next time I’m asking for one to take me to Arrivals.
If Ruinair didn’t exist, would Stansted airport shut down simply for lack of use? One in six flights out of Stansted is taken by some of the one million British people visiting second homes abroad, which they do on average six times a year. Ruinair flights here are like hailing a taxi. If you wait long enough, one will soon come along. Their aircraft are everywhere, like some bubonic plague. In the future, Boeing will manufacture all 737 aircraft with the Ruinair logo as the default livery. Boeing does not disclose production rates, but it is believed to build about twenty-eight 737s a month, or one every day. I read in the newspaper that a delay in the delivery of four new Boeing aircraft to Ruinair meant the airline was forced to cancel 1,200 flights, affecting an estimated 300,000 passengers. It is not untrue to conclude that the growth of this airline is only being impeded by Boeing’s failure to build new aircraft fast enough.
The UK aerospace industry’s trade surplus with the rest of the world shrank by a third one year, because of the huge volume of Boeing aircraft being brought into the UK by this single airline. Ruinair now have so many Boeing aircraft that they could easily lose one and then accidentally locate it again at some lesser-known airport.
Ruinair gave its flying angel logo bigger breasts. Mick ordered the change on all new Boeing 737-800 aircraft. The image boost was first spotted by Ruinair workers at Stansted airport. A spokesman said: ‘We decided to give our customers a more uplifting experience. We think she is rather aerodynamic.’ Ruinair’s spokeswoman for the Nordic region said: ‘We do not wish to milk the situation.’
Mick adores Boeing and he sometimes visits Seattle to collect new aircraft in person. ‘Boeing made a lot of bullshit promises in 1999 but uniquely in the history of aviation they have beaten them. This is the best bloody aircraft in the world for short-haul operations. You people build the best god-damn aircraft in the world. My three favourite words are ‘Made in Seattle’. I promise I won’t say anything like ‘Screw Airbus’. Bravo Boeing! Adios Airbus! Fuck the French. We are an oasis of Boeings in a sea of Airbuses in Europe. And I can’t fly the bloody things. I can’t even turn them on.’ Once he bought 9 billion US dollars worth of aircraft from Boeing at a significant discount, believed to be at $28 million each rather than the list price of $60 million: ‘We raped them. I wouldn’t even tell my priest what discount I got.’ Mick doesn’t like the wider Airbus A320. ‘I’ve heard a lot of horseshit about a wider fuselage. I’ve yet in fifteen years in this industry to meet one passenger who booked his ticket based on a wider fuselage.’
The terminal walls are plastered with advertisements for this airline. ‘This is the home of low fares.’ Here we live and breathe their Eurobrand. There is a route map but Western Europe has disappeared under a swathe of yellow arrows emanating from Stansted. This airline adds new routes at a rate only exceeded by the inflation rate in Zimbabwe. Along the way there’s a Ruinair aircraft outside with the words Arrividerci Alitalia. Stuff it to the Eyeties, but don’t get too xenophobic. Other aircraft announce Auf Wiedersehen Lufthansa. It must be great for a Lufthansa pilot to park at an airport stand and look at that jingoism out your cockpit window for 25 minutes (usual turnaround time). Other aircraft in the fleet have the slogans Say No to Lufthansa’s Fuel Tax, Say No to BA Fuel Levy, Bye Bye SkyEurope, Bye Bye EasyJet and Bye Bye Baby, the latter a reference to competitor BMI Baby rather than to a 1970s pop song. They might as well put on the side of every aircraft, To All Other European Airlines—Go Fuck Yourselves.
I walk the concourse. The newspaper headlines in W. H. Smith catch my eye. The Evening Standard has ‘Children Must Not Use Mobile Phones’. Unlikely. The Daily Sport has ‘TV Star’s Sex with Poodle Next Door’. Equally unlikely, I fear. The Sun has ‘One Hundred Thousand Holidays for a Fiver’. Is this news? Another Daily is asking its readers ‘What does it mean to be British?’ The best reply to date is from a man in Switzerland: ‘Being British is about driving in a German car to an Irish pub for a Belgian beer, then travelling home, grabbing an Indian curry or a Chinese on the way, to sit on Swedish furniture and watch American soap shows on a Japanese TV. And the most British thing of all? Suspicion of anything foreign.’
The Stansted Express to Liverpool Street is punctual, not cheap. It’s worth taking the train because the BAA tell us that last year there were 178 days of roadworks on the motorway to London and there are 571 sets of traffic lights between here and Central London. I gaze around. Airports, there’s nothing like them. The variety of people and cultures, excitement and expectation, arrival and escape, the last-minute crises, the personal dramas, the tearful partings and joyful reunions. I could live in an airport. Jesus, maybe I do.
I have always loved airlines and travel; eschewing a structured social order and a daily routine of life for a flight of fancy to a new world less familiar; cheating the four seasons. Mick is not such a fan. ‘The problem with the airline industry is it is so populated with people who grew up in the 1940s or 1950s who got their excitement looking at airplanes flying overhead. They wanted to be close to airplanes. Mercifully I was a child of the 1960s and a trained accountant, so aircraft don’t do anything for me. There’s a lot of big egos in this industry. That might be a better title for them, including myself rather than entrepreneurs. It’s a stupid business, which generally loses a lot of money. With the exception of Southwest and ourselves, and EzJet to a lesser extent, nobody makes a lot of money at it.’
But why go to Central London when I have shops, restaurants, cafés, a viewing gallery, ample seating and more tourists than I could ever encounter on Oxford Street or at Madame Tussauds? I decide to spend the remaining five hours of my allotted time in the UK here, and I engage in my continuing observation of my fellow users of this airport.
1. Italian Students. They reside permanently in Departures, sorted into large groups, surrounded by backpacks piled high on luggage trolleys. They are dressed by FCUK, Diesel and Quicksilver. They survive on communal bottles of mineral water and occasional trips to Prêt a Manger. They rarely venture into Central London. They keep in touch with the world via Dell laptops and Wifi G-mail. They grow goatee beards or shave only weekly. They fly home for significant events such as births, marriages or funerals but promptly return to their place of permanent residence, irresistibly drawn by fares of one euro and the absence of rent at Stansted. I don’t engage in voluntary conversation because the guys wear T-shirts which advise ‘Practice Safe Sex, Go Fuck Yourself’ or else ‘If You Don’t Like Oral Sex, Then Shut Your Mouth.’ Their spiky bohemian girlfriends wear T-shirts which advise ‘Your Son is in Good Hands’. These passengers are the key to success in the low fares airline business since they will happily take 6am flights to nowhere and catch two-hour-long bus excursions, whilst businessmen love Heathrow and BA. The difference is time. Businessmen are time poor. No one has more time to spare than