Working backwards

"It will seem like the four-hour layover in Heathrow will never end," Enrico had said by phone to me after his return to Seattle, "but eventually, it does." Indeed, it did seem long, having gotten up at 5:30 am to start my 20-hour journey home from Rome. Heathrow Airport does not strike me as the most logical of operations. There are shuttle buses that take you on impossibly long journeys between terminals - surely they aren't really that far apart? Departure gates are listed only in the appropriate terminal, but finding out which terminal to go to in the first place is surprisingly challenging. Just to change planes you have to go through security again. Being someone who generally gives the benefit of the doubt, I assume that the people who run Heathrow are doing their best with an overtaxed facility, and that Britain, having joined in with the foolish American war, feels it cannot rely on the security measures of other airports and must re-screen incoming travelers for themselves. Fair enough.

As I passed through the metal detector, I heard a security screener saying to her colleagues, "He looks bloody good for his age, don't he?" How crass, I thought, to be sizing us passengers up against our passports. I expect to queue in Britain, I expect things to be bureaucratic, but I expect it all to be handled with the utmost courtesy.

Having forgotten which bloody terminal I needed to go to next, I moved from the security line to the British Airways check-in counters, scanning the many video screens. I craned my neck to see around the tall gentleman in front of me, engaged in a similar scan, but I found no information of use. Just then, a British airways employee stepped up to my neighbor. "Have you checked in for your flight yet, Mr. Cleese?" she asked in clipped British tones. "No? Right then, this is the spot." And she bustled efficiently off.

First I thought, wait, why isn't she helping me too? Then I thought, how come she knows this guy's name? And then I thought - oh, I get it, that's John Cleese standing next to me. Thoroughly unremarkable in jeans and a baseball cap, close enough that I could pick his pocket. Suddenly the surprisingly rude comment I'd overheard at security made sense - they must have expedited his passage to the front of the long, serpentine line, where somebody noticed him enough to note that he looked "bloody good for his age." I glanced up at him again, unobtrusively. He did look bloody good for his age.

But now here he was, queuing up with the rest of us - and seemingly just as puzzled as I was with the logistics of it all, although surely given his profession he has passed through Heathrow hundreds of times. I smiled, hauled my backpack to my shoulders, and headed off. As I stepped onto the escalator, I paused to look back. Hundreds of people bustled this way and that, but not a soul seemed to notice the famous John Cleese, standing in line at first-class check-in.

So I'll say this for Heathrow - it may seem illogical and inefficient, but also reassuringly democratic; a level playing field of baffled travelers from all walks of life.