Toulouse-Blagnac Airport is a curious place of add-on marble-floored structures fed by numerous car parks. When I was first a regular user, in my criss-crossing of the south of France in search of a house, it was not too many steps up from a small regional airport, in spite of being the home of Airbus and the country’s Space City.
Security was pretty lax and there was always the feeling of an ongoing party in the arrivals and departures halls.
Once, arriving late at night, I coincided with a pilgrims’ return flight from Mecca. Exotic veiled creatures holding silver trays of mint tea waited as the men streamed off to uncurl prayer mats, dropping to their knees in thanks.
Fascinated, I sat on my bag to watch the joyful spectacle, feeling I’d disembarked at the wrong airport and had become caught up in an Arabian Nights tale.
The guttural, flighty tones of Arabic mingled with the sibilant, fast twang of southern France in a complementary and joyous song.
A glass of tea was poured from a long-spouted pot and handed to me by a kohl-eyed matron whose eyes twinkled behind her veil.
The Hajj (pilgrimage) normally takes place in September, a still hot month here. And I remember, as I reluctantly left to find my hire car, the doors parting, and the slap of the night heat in my face.
Back then I still thrilled to the novelty of the foreign, “abroad” warmth on arriving from a usually cold and fog- or frost-bound UK.
That intake of scented breath from hot house flowers growing outside; that gentle stroke of hidden sun on an arm suddenly released from jacket or cardigan.
I was living in a friend’s empty “staff” cottage in a glorious Dorset village straight out of an Aga saga; with a village church entered by a lychgate and a pub of the type shown in an episode of Midsomer Murders.
Behind me was an edgy city, Glasgow; all new money, private clubs, chippy, suddenly beautifully dressed, sons and daughters of a once sneered at mean city. A city I often scorned but was already missing with a searing intensity in my bucolic lodgings offered by friends as a halfway house to where I was set upon.
And now I was here: rather excited, nervous, veering wildly between the madness of what I was doing and a calm flutter of certainty that it was just another stage in life.
So many arrivals and departures I had at Blagnac, as for six months I searched and searched.
Usually I returned to the comforting, increasingly familiar border of Dorset and Wiltshire, appreciating its duvet warmth with the disquieting awareness that I was suddenly unsure, adrift, yet set on a course that couldn’t be changed.
But also knowing that even if I changed my mind, this little cottage was as unaffordable to me as the lovely conversion I’d left behind in Glasgow’s Park Circus.
A gratifying number of you have stayed with me from day one on this ridiculous flight to France. So you may remember some of the emotional twists and turns
I went through – and am still going through.
Entering Blagnac pre-Christmas I recalled many of those moments too for some reason.
Perhaps it was, when I realised, following accidents and buggered smoking lungs diagnosis, I was no longer able to race through the airport at the last minute, flinging myself and bag to handlers with a laughing quip.
In just over 10 years I have become a pale imitation of the fit (sort of) woman in Tod’s loafers who slightly skipped along the concourse.
And Blagnac had changed too – becoming an expanded, watchful, guarded version of itself.
No longer would Mecca returnees be welcomed by women with their faces covered bearing mint tea; no longer would I accept a glass and laugh in pleasure at being somewhere at once so familiar and strange.
Instead, as gun-toting guards prowl the halls, I stand, staring at the taped-off lift and escalator, and realise I have to get myself and case up two lots of open stairs to departures.
There is nobody on this floor and so I grab the rail, grab the case and within three steps feel the tightness in the chest and stop, knowing, these days, I’ve given myself bloody hours to march on.
A young woman on a mobile at the top turns, trips down with such light dancing steps. She grabs my case but being French gives me some dignity: “You permit?”
Oh, yes. Please. Thank you.
On my long journey to the plane steps, three others, all women, stop when I stop to still the laboured breathing. “Do you need help?” they ask.
“No, thank you,” I reply with a smile. “Just a pause.”
Just a pause. A moment.
A look ahead to the steps to the EasyJet aircraft and a momentary panic that the still suspect leg will not push on and up. It did, if slower than the others. But it worked in its way.
And that, this first week in the new year, is my truth now. I’m still “working” in my way.
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