The airport beat

Heathrow Airport has a writer-in-residence.

The New York Times reports that Author Alain de Botton is roaming the London airport for a week, chatting up passengers and employees, then perching at a desk smack in the middle of a terminal. As he enters notes into a laptop, they appear on a nearby large screen. After a week of this, de Botton will head home to craft his thoughts into a book to be called “A Week at the Airport: A Heathrow Diary.”

Much of the news coverage of this thoroughly brilliant idea (thought up by a London PR agency) flogs two themes:

(1) Won’t it be awful if the author is a shill for the airport?
(2) Isn’t it terribly brave to allow an uncensored writer such access?

I’ll save you some time and answer those queries:

(1) No.
(2) No.

Of course he’s a shill. But even such confederates can be funny, sharp, observant and entertaining. de Button writes about an enormous range of topics, from architecture to Proust. His popular book, “The Art of Travel,” is promoted this way: “Unlike existing guidebooks on travel, it dares to ask what the point of travel might be – and modestly suggests how we could learn to be less silently and guiltily miserable on our journeys.”

Clearly this is a man who will manage to tell the truth without seriously wounding the folks who gave him the keys to the place.

As for the palaver about Heathrow officials’ bravery, consider this: Millions of people pass through this and every other international airport every day. Most of them are cranky. All of them have friends and family and co-workers with whom they share stories of how ill served they were while flying, retrieving baggage, being searched, paying $11 in local currency for a sandwich made 2 days earlier.

One writer on the loose is not such a big threat.