Wider Reading | Anthem for Heathrow Airport

Two principal impetuses for this post. Number one, last Thursday I went to the Bella Union Christmas Party at the magnificent Union Chapel, Islington, which was headlined by Peter Broderick – and it turned out to be one of the best things I'd seen all year. I'd heard Peter's work before, but live, he was completely mesmerising, using silence and the Union Chapel's natural acoustics in a way I've never seen done before, and doing remarkable things with at least four instruments, not to mention his own voice overdubbed all over itself again and again and again.

Number two, our Poetry Editor, Phil Brown, is currently doing his best to convince Heathrow Airport et al to allow him to fly to Brazil, with increasingly dispiriting results. Him and the other ten thousand people currently fighting for thermal blankets and free sandwiches in a draughty terminal. Poor bastard. Poor bastards. Anyway, this one's for you Phil, this one's for everybody queuing up outside Kings Cross St Pancras, for the ever-growing population of Heathrow, for my little brother's girlfriend no longer able to fly to Prague, you poor, poor bastards. It seemed as achingly appropriate as achingly lovely. Not necessarily for the reasons Broderick himself intended, but insofar as its opening lines…

First I'm here and then I'm there
Then I'm here and then I'm there
From there I'll go anywhere
And there's always somewhere
That I'll be going

…are surely an elegant description of how the people who sat in an aircraft for ten hours before being told to get out again must have felt, just as its closing sequence…

I say goodbye too often
Hello, hello
I say goodbye too often
Hello, hello, hello
I say goodbye too often
Hello, hello, hello
Hello, hello, hello

…is the sound of five thousand bored tourists meeting five thousand bored would-be tourists and playing cards, drinking coffee, moving from check-in desk to information guy to check-in desk to information guy, going home again, saying goodbye to friends and family again, coming back, playing cards and so on. Over to Peter and 'Hello to Nils':

Incidentally, as I'm sure regular readers will have realised, the big holes in the last week's worth of content are down to both James and myself getting stuck in snow over the weekend, not to mentions various other less-than-interesting weather-related stories. We'll be getting back on track as soon as possible.

SKS