“In a world full of chaos and imperfection, the terminal seemed to me a luxurious and fascinating refuge, full of logic and elegance… Had I been asked to take a Martian on a visit to a place neatly encompassing the whole spectrum of themes running through our civilization, I would certainly have made for the arrivals and departures halls.” In the summer of 2009, the well known writer Alain de Botton was invited by BAA to move into the departures hall at London Heathrow for a week, at a desk placed between zone D and zone E. The aim was to gather impressions and testimonies and work them up into a book. The result - A week at the airport - is entertaining but also thought provoking. This, for instance, is how he describes “the biggest bookshop in the terminal”: “... from the number of covers featuring blood one might conclude that a large slice of the passenger category nurtures an acute desire to be terrified. Up in the sky, they wanted to experience the panic of being killed, to forget about more banal fears, about the success of a convention in Salzburg for instance… . On the next shelf along, there was an assortment of classic novels, arranged not by author or title but by the country they were set in. As a guide to Prague, you were offered Milan Kundera, while Raymond Carver was there to reveal the hidden personality of places between Los Angeles and Santa Fe. Oscar Wilde said there was less fog in London before James Whistler started painting. One might wonder whether the silence and melancholy of little townships in the American West might not have been less noticeable before Carver started writing.”