Sitting down for long haul flight, the lottery of who you’ll end up next to for those long hours is always quite exciting. That is, until an enormous sweaty Leb plonks himself down beside you.
Mercifully, T does well with his bulk, allowing me to relax for the most part. Not only that, but he has some genuinely interesting conversation; he’s been in the US for six years as a host of an IT programme that is broadcast in Arabic all over the world. In Geekdom he is probably some kind of minor celebrity.
We shoot the shit easily enough with none of the usual awkwardness about how to end the small talk. After that I settle down for the 14 hour flight to New York with four movies and Paul Theroux’s Great Railway Bazar, which I’ve been reading on and off four months. It’s little wonder no one bothers to read my magazine really; the movie selection is excellent. Watching Key Largo (1948 ), Frost/Nixon (2008 ), A Street Car Named Desire (1951) and Slumdog Millionaire (2008 ) passes the time quick enough and I’ve barely time to wonder at how incredibly overrated the final offering is before we’ve touched down.
The fat Leb and I go our separate ways as he has a Green Card and can skip the enormous immigration queue I must join to get into the country. It’s as depressing as it is amazing to see how much harder America is to enter since I first did it as a pre-9/11 18-year-old.
Forty-five minutes and an unusually friendly conversation with an immigration officer later, I’m on American soil, lost and trying to find my connecting flight to Chicago. When the monorail gets held up with a bomb scare (a cardboard box) a woman comes over.
“What’s wrong with the Air Train?” She asks.
“It ran out of air?” I offer.
“Huh?”
A man comes over, having heard my accent. Once upon a time he was Scottish too, which gives him justification to blether for a bit and ask for my card. He lives here in NYC and has a load of suggestions about how to best spend the day I’ll have at the end of the trip. I doubt I’ll ever hear from him again.
For such a famous place, JFK airport is an astonishing shit hole. A bit like Aintree racecourse, it seems constantly on the break of complete breakdown; no one knows where they’re supposed to go, dozens of different languages flutter through the air, and all the while there’s a paranoid, though barely competent, security army overseeing everything.
The flight on to Chicago is around two and a half hours long, the duration of which I spend asleep. When the direct flight launches from Abu Dhabi in September it will total around 17 hours, making it the airline’s longest by some way. It will surely be more comfortable than the cramped, untrustworthy domestic connection too.
I land and clamber into the Airport Express, a van that makes a killing by stuffing eight strangers in the back for about half of what it would cost each of us for a cab. Though we’re all strangers, bullshit conversation quickly builds. For me, though, it’s 6am so I stick my earphones in.
One thing that must be noted about Americans: they do a great job of pretending to give a great big fuck about nothing in particular. Tell them some inane detail about your life and just listen to them ooh and ahh in amazement. They will inevitably follow that up with insisting on telling you about the most tenuous link they have to Scotland because, like the English, they essentially think it’s one big mountain village where everyone drinks and fights together.
I’m staying at the Four Seasons, a hotel far too posh for scum like me, but very nice nonetheless. My room is on the 41st floor and I’ve just about got enough energy to acknowledge the amazing view across Lake Michigan before stuffing a handful of complimentary pretzels in my mouth and falling into a grateful sleep.