When I was young, after fairgrounds [Goose Fair & Alton Towers] the next closest thing interms of amazement and enjoyment was the airport.
I remember being about 5 years old watching in wonder as the doors to the departures lounge would slide open by themselves.
BY THEMSELVES.
Seriously.
There wasn’t any person pulling them apart or pushing them back together … they would open by magic as you approached.
How fucking cool is that!
I would spend hours running in, running out … trying to catch them out and never succeeding.
Then there was the time I was with my parents at some Italian airport in the middle of the night.
It was probably about 4am and every 20 minutes or so, 3 soldiers – walking in a triangular shape – would move through the airport carrying guns.
REAL GUNS.
MACHINE GUNS.
I distinctly remember wondering why my parents were trying to sleep when there were people walking in front of our eyes with guns in a building that had magic doors. Didn’t they realise we were living a scene out of a Star Wars type of movie? Madness …
And then there were the planes.
I still remember the time my Dad took my hand and led me up to a window and showed me an Air India 747 that was parked on the other side of the glass.
It was huge.
Massive.
Bigger than anything I’d ever seen.
And then Dad told me it was going to fly us home.
WTF?
And then he said something else …
It was going to just fly us home, but about 300 other people too. At the same time.
How the hell was it going to do that and how on earth was it possible that 300 all lived in our house and I’ve never met them before.
For me, flying was never about any glamour … it was always about excitement and discovery.
To be honest, the journey to the airport … the time in the airport … and the time on board the plane were the things I enjoyed the most, though I always got a thrill stepping out of the plane and being engulfed by a light and warmth that seemed to come from another planet.
All that was when I used to – if I was lucky – fly once a year, most probably to Italy.
Now let’s zoom forward 30+ odd years.
I fly further than I ever used to as a kid, on better planes than I ever used to as a kid and more often than I ever used to as a kid.
And while many things relating to my excitement about traveling have changed over the years … from no longer spending every second on board the plane trying to take in every possible experience and detail [instead, I now fall asleep pretty much the moment I sit in my seat] through to no longer needing to buy something from the duty free catalogue as a momento of my trip … the fact is I still get a sense of excitement when I know I’m about to go on a trip and that’s quite handy because over the next 2 weeks I’m going to see quite a lot of them … in Shanghai, Paris, Rio and Sydney.
[Not that I’m smiling. Oh no. It’s all for work so there’ll be no time for fun whatsoever. Ahem]
Now I did think about turning all this plane/airport and travel mumbling into some sort of vague planning “lesson” – in fact I wrote an overlong piece going on about the importance of frames of reference and how they can be [should be] used to define a role for the brand that transcends category convention while delivering greater meaning in the hearts and minds of both their direct and indirect audiences while still pushing significant commercial value – however apart from the fact I got myself in all sorts of muddles trying to explain what the hell I meant, I remembered none of you would give a shit anyway as you just come here to lay insults so instead I decided to leave it as an explanation of why I’ll only be sporadically updating this blog for the next couple of weeks.
Did I mention I’m off to Rio, Paris & Sydney? Ha.