21 Jan 2016 (12.06 to 12.13)
It is a bleak bleak morning, the sun blotted out by a blanket of dark gray clouds.
Light seeps through without awakening the bright colours of nature and instead
the landscape seems pale and lifeless. I sit in the arrivals lounge of Gatwick
airport, watching the intermittent streams of humanity, once so close to the
heavens, now yoked to their oblong shaped belongings which they drag behind
them symbolizing their descent back to the land of mere mortals. It is
surprisingly quiet. In the background a hubbub of distant voices, indistinct,
whisper-like broken by the rhythmic drumbeat of stiletto heels and clickety-click
of suitcase wheels as pass the gaps between gray white hard as stone square
tiles. I notice a faint aroma of coffee and see to my left a bright red neon sign of
‘Costa’ Coffee (or as Nick Park subverted it’s true nature to it in one of his
animations, as ‘Costly Coffee’!) conveniently just across the ‘arrivals’ portal.
Hitomi has now gone, disappeared without trace into the machine run labyrinth
of ‘departures’. Screens instructing passengers to ‘put all liquids into the clear
plastic bag’, then pass through the train–like ticket checking machines, followed
by the x-ray machines displaying the skeletal-like contents of bags as they pass
through their journey.