"It can hardly be a coincidence thad no language on Earth has ever produced the expression 'as pretty as an airport'.

Airports are ugly. Some are very ugly. Some attain a degree of ugliness that can only be the result of a special effort. This ugliness arises because airports are full of people who are tired, cross, and have just discovered that their luggage has landed in Murmansk (Murmansk airport is the only known exception to this otherwise infallible rule), and architects have on the whole tried to reflect this in their designs.

They have sought to highlight the tiredness and crossness motif with brutal shapes and nerve-jangling colours to make effortless the business of separating the traveller for ever from his or her luggage or loved ones, to confuse the traveller with arrows that appear to point at the windows, distant tie racks, or the current position of Ursa Minor in the night sky, and wherever possible to expose the plumbing on the grounds that it is functional, and conceal the location of the departure gates, presumably on the grounds that they are not."

Thus starts Douglas Adams' second Dirk-Gently-novel, "The Long Dark Tea-Time Of The Soul" (1988, yes that's right, 20 years ago), and it is the most accurate description to date of the despair that is London Heathrow International Airport. Remember also the song "I'm so worried" by Monty Python, in which the line "And I'm worried about the baggage retrieval system they've got at Heathrow" is repeated in the end of every couplet. Heathrow is a(n inter)national trauma.

But wait! The architects have learned, and so have British Airways! Terminal 5 was to end all the misery we suffered at terminals 1-4, a brand-new, stylish, shiny building with the feel of a luxury spa and a brand new baggage handling system that would leave no room for complaints, ever more.

I feel almost sorry for them now. For a whole week now, the news have been usurped by the disaster that turned out to be the opening of terminal 5. Around 430 flights have been cancelled since the terminal opened last Thursday, and about 20,000 bags remain to be identified and forwarded to their destinations. In fact, so I learned from one newspaper, they are already considering shipping those piles of luggage to other places to have them sorted out, the paper mentioned Milan. That's in Italy! One would hope they rather wouldn't FLY them anywhere now, at least not from T5, if they wanted to prevent any further mess, and embarrassment. Clearly, the architecture concealed all to well the non-functionality..

And I keep thinking about the reason why the word is actually "terminal" -- doesn't that have a foreboding ring to it? (Oh and the conspiracy-theorists can of course have a go and muse about the ominous number 5)