Travelblog part 1

I am currently on the first leg of a long journey to Trinidad for a business meeting. I don’t much see the need for this meeting but the client is paying me my daily charge rate to go and to fly business class, so I’m not complaining.

As BA seemed likely to go on strike, I decided to fly with American Airlines, which is a first. My life is thus existing in an odd parallel to Timorous Beastie’s.

You find me in the business lounge at Heathrow, which is a place that’s trying so hard to be plutocratic. Plutocratic doesn’t describe it though and as I don’t know of any word that combines plutocratic, kitch, bogus and snooty I’m not sure there is a word to describe describe it pithily. Imagine some very snotty country club in California; a place where the urge to conform has persisted into late middle age instead of dying out with adolescence. Deck all the walls with lots of dark redwood panelling in the presumed manner of a Pall Mall gentleman’s club. Create lots of recessed little backlit alcoves, into which incongruously place fake bronze busts and little statues of Greek and Roman gods. Picture a few servile members of staff silently removing used plates from their sahibs’ tables in return for no eye contact and no thanks. You’re getting close. I just took a picture of the place with my camera phone to the obvious disapproval of the guy in Polo Ralph Lauren weekend gear next to me. His reproachful glance told me instantly that I have been categorised at white trash. Which, to be fair, I sort of am.

This is the up-itself world of “posh” America; for which read America with money. Those at the front of the plane have a very different experience to those at the back. The gulf in the plane mirrors the gulf in American society. Sure, business class on Virgin Atlantic is vastly better (and I really do mean much better) than economy but it’s understood to be a business transaction, not that one is simply better.

American airlines (lower case helpfully denoting the generic rather than the particular brand: grammar does matter) are generally a disappointment, with Continental the only US airline I’ve ever liked. In a society famed for customer service, I’ve generally found them to be uncomfortable and generally pretty shoddy. Their puritanical attitude to alcohol is irksome.

America entrances me and appals me in approximately equal measure. It is the land that gave us Bush but it also gave us “South Park” and “the Simpsons”. It is a land of extraordinary clashes and contradictions. Americans treat their Bill of Rights with religious reverence and are smug in how they dreamed it up; ignoring the little known fact that it largely plagiarises the English Bill of Rights of 1688. Despite treating freedom as a word that denotes all things good, half of America is none too keen on the freedom of others (viz abortion, gay marriage). I find exposure to American society surprisingly tiring. The paperwork I was given at check-in is wearisome in its earnestness and officiousness. A European airline wouldn’t behave in such a way and I’m pleased about that. Get me to my bed at the other end and then get me back to Manchester.