Airports - You've got a smiling face.

I'm at Belfast City Airport. There's a kid in a papoose repeating the same note over and over. "Meh." she drones, hanging from her mother's backpack. "Meh."

I know how she feels. 

I've been at the airport for 45 minutes. I've bought a deodorant, looked at perfume and watches and the true crime and self-help books that make up the airport top ten list. I looked to see if The Black Dreams is in the special Northern Irish section - of course not. I've had a wee and queued for a floppy croissant and a bucket of scalded milk. So, other than drinking a beer at 9 in the morning, I've done all the things to do at the airport.  It is two and a half hours till my flight. 

Some of this is my fault - I'm always far too early at the airport. But an hour of it is not my fault. It is the fault of the King. King Charles the Third (CIIIR) is flying into George Best Airport today as he's still on his introductory "here-I-am" tour of his new "realms". As though we didn't know who he was. Realm is a word I've heard a lot in the last week. People have been banging on about realms in hushed tones - it's like living in the Marvel universe. The hushed tone is the only acceptable form of communication at the moment - yesterday a man was arrested for holding up a blank placard as the Queen's body rolled past. In a hearse. Not on a hospital gurney like Jim Dale. That WOULD have been disrespectful. 

The BBC's handling of this has been remarkable. Hour after hour of drone footage of a black car beetling through the Scottish countryside. If it were BBC4 and you had the sound down, you could mistake it for mindfulness, "slow" programming. Or perhaps the opening few scenes of "Under the Skin" (though not inter-cut with scenes of Scarlett Johansson stripping a corpse. That TOO would have been disrespectful). Don't turn the sound off though, you'll miss the parched, surrealistic banter of the commentators just saying what they see hour after hour, like some nightmare marathon version of "Catchphrase". The poetry of the banal is poetry nonetheless, and some of them have been free-styling for days. There's nothing left in the tank and still they battle on: the hoarse on the hearse. 

I wonder how clever a game the BBC has been playing with its blanket of enforced grieving. The obsequious, humourless* and craven rolling-news of Death Con 1 has been a sot to the most reactionary people in the country. When this is all over, the BBC will have to go back to its normal schedules, and the red tops will start clamoring for its destruction again. The reactionary Royalists - with their goldfish memories - will be saying "Exactly! What has the BBC ever done for us?", and the people who ordinarily defend the BBC, will wonder why it turned into the North Korean News channel for a fortnight. What happened to balance, or is balance only a way of getting a comical Nazi on Question Time? Every time Nicholas Witchell appears on screen, they should cut to a sans culotte oiling a guillotine. Balance. 

So the King is touching down at Belfast City Airport and my flight's delayed. 

The women in Starbucks - the only place in the Airport selling food - are tireless and sunny, even though they never seem to get a break. All of them are from Europe. When I give the girl at the till my name for the cup, she bursts into a warm smile, as though there is something exotic and exciting about my name. And maybe there is. We're a dying breed, Johns. It's all "Jordans" and "Jarlaths" down my way. I could learn a lot from the Starbucks staff. Yes, I'm trapped in an airport for another two hours, but I have a seat, I have coffee, pen and paper and I can block out the shrieking of other people's children if I try very hard. 

After an hour and a half I buckle and have a breakfast pint. I marvel at the shit branding of The Artisan, the only pub in the airport. It's sponsored by Yardsman from the Hercules brewing company (note to non-Belfast readers: Hercules is one of those big yellow cranes that appear on every tea towel in Belfast. Yardsman is a reference to the dockworkers who used to work in the dock yards). Belfast loves it's shipbuilding past so there are signs all over the pub proclaiming "Like our forefathers we don't take shortcuts to get the job done" and "Yardsman pays homage to the great men and women who worked at the mills, the yards and factories. The good men and women who valued people above possessions."

To be fair, the possessions of a Belfast factory worker 100 years ago probably weren't worth having. I tend to value people over a hammer, a lunchbox and a hat. Most people. Best of all is the claim that the lager is "filtered through Irish linen". Of course it is. This is illustrated with a line drawing of a chin jutting riveter clutching his hammer, like Thor in dungarees. These spurious claims at tradition and the equally embarrassing worship of the past - things were more REAL then - are ludicrous. There is no link between working in a ship yard and selling beer for the breakfast crowd at an Airport. 

Pubs didn't used to have themes. Pubs didn't used to have to be about something. You don't get insurance companies decorating their offices with murals of spitfires and declaring themselves "The first of the few...for your peace of mind." Or a fishmonger's dedicated to the memory of the inventor of the whistling kettle.** A pub used to be a room with a bar where a man with undiagnosed PTSD would serve you a drink without making eye-contact. It wasn't better. It was probably worse. But at least it wasn't dedicated to, and proud to uphold the values of, French Farm-workers in the 100 Years War. 

The Airport is the only place Sydney Youngblood gets regular rotation. "If Only I Could" is a strange collection of noises: Spanish guitar, vibes, wah wah, an 808 drum beat and Sydney's choked warbling. It's a stranger record than you remember. If you remember it at all. Which, let's face it, you don't. 

It's 10.15. I should be boarding now. Just another hour and fifteen minutes to go. I give you his Majesty King Charles III - may God bless him and keep him in exile. I'll have another pint. It better have a crown on it or I will kick off. 

*literally. Comedy has been banned until after the funeral. 

**Harry Bramson. Though it is contested. Citation needed. 

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Southampton Airport Cafe offers something called "The Continental Brunch Plank". 

I arrive at Southampton Airport early. And it's a good job. I'm turned away from check-in for being too early. Give me five minutes, says Dan, the surly check-in guy, who looks like that bloke who got an "ology" on the BT ads in the 80's. You remember. 

Dan (right) yesterday. 

Dan gives me a desultory wave as I hover about, and I step forward to receive the benediction of a boarding pass. But he can't open the system. For the next half an hour I stand at the window, a worried queue forming behind me, while the members of staff flap and pace and make phone-calls and fail to get me a boarding pass, talking only among themselves, never to me. Not once. 

At the half hour mark the machine judders into life and Dan finally acknowledges my existence with a sour "Got there in the end" as he passes over the bit of paper. English customer service - the envy of the world. 

I go through customs without a hitch (belt off but shoes allowed) and head to the cafe. "I'm not open at the moment." says the woman standing there like a zombie distracted by a last thought. "It'll be five or ten minutes." It's nearly 11 in the morning, but sleepy old Southampton airport is still rubbing its eyes and doing stretches. It later transpires the cafe isn't doing coffee "today". This place is amazing. I have a pint of Madri for elevenses. 

I'm among the English. This is my base level of normal, and these are undoubtedly my people: dull and boring, hunched and tubby, complaining and mucking about, and all of them with the watery, nothingy accent that typifies my part of the islands. It is soft, nasal, irritable. A bit of cockney, a bit of yokel but with all the edges sanded away. A soft wet noise like the popping of a blister. I can't help but feel comforted by this noise. It's like crabby whale-song, or listening to New Age music in a bus queue. Grumpy gamelan. 

Equally, there is something undeniably foreign about the English to me. I've been away a long time. I find them a bit frightening, slightly bestial. They're more fuzzy than hairy. They wear toddler's clothes. They are extensively illustrated, like a boring children's story or the laminated menu in an English cafe on the Costa del Golf. The man sitting across me has a forearm like a toilet wall. Are those phone numbers and spunking cocks? 

They are all drinking at 11 in the morning. As am I, admittedly, but when I do it it's suave and charming. They are laughing loudly in their groups, leaning back, arms folded across their chests. What other nation has body language like this? "I'm enjoying myself - DON'T COME NEAR ME."

They're fine in the main: confused, odd, short-changed. A race of moaners. But they're alright. Just don't get them onto politics. It's a fucking shit show. 

I'm still reading Hilary Mantel's "Beyond Black". In a sense, I will never not be reading Hilary Mantel's "Beyond Black", as it appears to have been written specifically for me. Thanks Hilary. Sorry it took me twenty years to get round to it. When I say it appears to have been written specifically for me, I mean it seems to contain everything I would like from a novel, and it works as an instructional work, exhibiting exhilarating story telling and technical finesse in every line. It is, perhaps, everything I'd like to do but at a sustained and heightened level. It's a masterpiece. I've long since stopped reading it linearly. I dip into it for a sudden shot of wonder, like plunging your hand into a box of chocolates and getting something delicious every time. 

There are two men in front of me. The elder one has a Guinness, the younger a craft ale in a handled jug. They are facing each other, leaning back and talking on the phone. Not, I suspect, to each other. The older one has contrived to fold his arms and still press his phone to his ear. Makes yer proud. 

Rule Britannia.