16 Aug 2011 01:55:35
The first time Tony Parsons took a flight, it was the 1970s and he was a young music journalist travelling to Philadelphia to join Thin Lizzy on the road. It wasn't a great start – the plane was delayed and sat on the tarmac for six hours – "but it didn't bother me at all. It was so enormously exciting."
Parsons believes "we have lost that sense of wonder" about air travel, which explains in part his decision to spend a week as writer in residence at Heathrow, researching a book for which he already has a title, a rigid format and a publication date set for October.
He also has airport operator BAA's marketers to thank, who, buoyed by the success two years ago of their first writer in residence, Alain de Botton, decided to repeat the exercise this summer. Where Botton wrote a well-received diary of his time at the airport, Parsons has been commissioned to write a collection of short stories based on the many thousands who will work at and travel through Heathrow in the coming week.
BAA will certainly welcome a reinjection of romance, having weathered an enduring and damaging dispute between British Airways, Heathrow's flagship operator, and its staff.
Parsons' enthusiasm is engaging. While de Botton spent much of his week behind a desk in Terminal 5, the novelist plans to "wander", speaking to cleaners, firemen, pilots and air traffic controllers, as well as harassed passengers.
"I think airports are places of huge human drama," he said. "The more I see of it, the more I am convinced that Heathrow is a secret city, with its own history, folklore and mythology. But what has surprised me is the love the people who work there feel for the place. Everyone seems to think they are plugged into something majestic."
Standing in the control tower monitoring weather systems in Africa and backed-up planes in San Francisco felt like being "plugged into the centre of the universe," he said.
The book, Departures: Seven Stories from Heathrow, published by HarperCollins in October, will be Parsons' 13th. Five thousand copies will be given away to Heathrow passengers. The writer, now 58, began his career as a music writer at the NME, but has been better known as a novelist since publishing Man and Boy in 1999. He currently writes a column for the Mirror.
The project also has a personal aspect. On Monday, his late father's brother, Ken, who is in his 80s, is returning home to Canada after his first trip to Britain for decades.
"I'm having dinner with him and my cousin on Monday night. I don't know when or if he will ever come back again. That's the thing about airports – people pass through, and sometimes it's very ordinary stuff … and other times it's the last glimpse of one kind of life."
