John Butleron the lost glamour of international travel
When I was seven years old I loved going to the airport. My memory has since refashioned it in a stylish palette of autumn tones, constantly bathed in evening light, and I can recall spending hours riding up and down the escalators, talking loudly about my forthcoming trip to Greece, or China, or Miami. I used to fantasise about living in the airport. On the concourse I would affect world-weariness, telling anyone within earshot that flying was actually quite draining after a while but that I did have high hopes for this particular trip, which was a safari in . . . Congo.
Looking back, I don't think anyone bought it. Everyone could tell that, for the average seven-year-old, the airport itself was the final destination. In all probability I was there, with the rest of my family, to welcome back my elder sister from another language exchange abroad. It seemed to me that, by the age of 14, Anne had already finagled her way into the perfect grown-up life. She flew, spoke languages and had foreign currency in her pocket.
In these times of €1 flights and harassed cabin crew flogging bingo tickets, it's easy to forget the romantic potency of the airport - and the high glamour of flying - back in the day. Of course, nothing is as glamorous as it seems. If you were lucky enough to holiday overseas, before you even set foot in the airport you had to pick up brochures at JWT and choose a hotel based on a single photo.
Similarly, my sister's trips to France had a mundane academic side that I have conveniently ignored, but in the summer of my seventh year my fevered desire to travel overseas was finally granted, for a family holiday in Majorca. This was the year of the pope's visit to Ireland, and I had fallen under the spell of John Paul's roadshow hook, line and crucifix. In 1979 he was my Elvis. I was such an ardent fan that when our flight touched down at Palma airport, and we disembarked, I kissed the ground by way of homage.
Majorca was great, but I was already straining at the leash. Anne went to these places by herself, and on her travels she gathered a huge cadre of pen pals; sackloads of mail from all manner of exotic French kids, kids with motor scooters and Led Zeppelin cassettes. She received so much mail that she would spend entire weekends in her bedroom, sifting through correspondence. One of my clearest memories has her sitting on the floor of her bedroom, studiously ripping envelopes.
Anne had pre-imagined the concept of identity theft, and back then no envelope would leave our house intact. The identity thieves huddled around the bins outside could only guess as to her identity. A name. If they only had a name! What one could have done with the identity of a 14-year-old in the 1980s is unclear to me now, but no chances were being taken up in the bedroom with the exotic motoring stickers on the door - Elf, Agip, Havoline.
The following summer my big sister excelled herself, finagling an exchange to Provence, and at the end of her stay we drove down en famille to pick her up. From there we were going camping, and, if memory serves, when we reached the house no one answered the door. We walked around the back. This was to be my first glimpse of the reality of life on a foreign exchange, and I don't know about everyone else, but my breath was bated.
I may be embellishing slightly, but I think my dad pushed open the wooden door to the backyard, and, inside, a gang of long-haired French teens sat around the swimming pool smoking filterless cigarettes, their girlfriends parading around the water's edge, topless. My father's 14-year-old daughter was sitting in the middle, and though I don't know what she was thinking about, it may have been a mental count of the envelopes that would need to be ripped that winter. I remember feeling highly unusual. We left fairly promptly, and to this day I can't listen to the solo from Stairway to Heaven without wistfully revisiting teenage life in Salon-de-Provence in the 1980s.
How deeply these memories embed themselves, and how well the mind reshapes them to our own taste. There is no irony to be found in the fact that my sister has long since tired of the international travelling life - in her line of work, it is a busman's holiday. These days she enjoys her family time in Dublin as much as anything that can be found in another country. But, as is often the case with those we look up to, she has left me chasing my own version of her experiences.
What is sad, and depressingly true, is that the memories of my sister the international traveller are far too elusive to recapture in my own life. I live out of a suitcase, yet, whatever life I imagined her enjoying, it is not to be found on this planet, in these times. In fact it's like trying to send oneself back to sleep after a particularly great dream. Not only are penfriends a thing of the past, thanks to all this enabling, demystifying technology, this blessing and curse that has shrunk the globe into one large suburb, but gone too is the glamour of travel. Thailand is now Majorca, and Majorca is Donabate. Don't ask me what Donabate represents.
Next time you're sitting on EI-whatever, idly leafing through an in-flight magazine extolling the virtues of Dubrovnik, Stockholm or N'Djamena, consider this: back in the 1980s, everyone on that aircraft was excited. The pioneers were 14 years old, and they flew alone to France. They spent centimes and gave us dreams.
John Butler blogs at http://wordpress.lozenge.com