Here is an excerpt from an article on a 'writer in residence' who lived for a time and wrote in London's Heathrow airport. To read the entire article, click here.
(CNN) -- The man at a check-in counter at London's Heathrow Airport lost it.
He had just made a frantic sprint to catch his flight to Tokyo, Japan, only to be told he was too late to board. So he banged his fists on the counter and let out a primal scream so loud that he could be heard at the other end of the terminal.
Alain de Botton was watching it all unfold -- one of the many human dramas he observed as Heathrow's first "writer-in-residence." The job required him to do what many travelers would dread: Spend a week at the airport.
Last year, at the invitation of the company that owns Heathrow, de Botton set up a desk in the departures hall of Terminal 5 (perhaps best known to many travelers for its massive baggage handling problems when it opened in 2008) and took in the sights of what he calls "the imaginative center of contemporary culture."
He also visited the factory where workers assemble thousands of airline meals every day, watched air traffic controllers follow the path of planes on a giant map "like parents worrying about their children" and contemplated the poetry of a room-service menu at his airport hotel, where the roar of a plane taking off once prompted a waiter to shout, "God help us!"
De Botton, a Swiss-born writer who lives in London, chronicles his experiences in "A Week at the Airport," an elegantly slim and funny book recently released in the United States.
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