The view from the airplane window on the western approach to Heathrow Airport confirms your arrival in England. You couldn’t be anywhere else in the world. The ‘patchwork quilt’ of fields, outlined by hedges or stone walls tells of hundreds of years of agricultural activity.  In May it’s like Joseph’s coat of many colors; fresh, vivid greens compete with the astonishing yellow of oilseed rape blossoms (here we call the harvested oil Canola Oil – it sounds better). The shocking purple of lavender stands alone, unmatched by neighbors. 

It’s a bucolic scene, soon to be shattered by the realities of Heathrow Airport’s crazy business and the world becomes a blur of whizzing gray; the tarmac, luggage tugs, the planes themselves, the buildings with boring gray facades giving no clue to what goes on inside, the buses, camouflaged, melt in and out of the alleyways, ginnels and snickets that make airport roadways into a maze that threatens no escape. The thronging masses hurriedly make their way to immigration – today a relatively painless exercise, lines having been reduced by relying on technology, matching your physiognomy to an aging passport photo (facial recognition looming large) and on to the seemingly interminable wait for luggage to reacquaint itself.

If you’re lucky enough to have arrived with no prior connection, when luggage could just as well have landed in Lebanon as London, Customs at Heathrow was totally unmanned – not an enquiring, living sole stood by the stainless-steel tables to rifle through one’s underwear or toiletries. Of course, you have to exit by the gift shop – in this case, the last call for Duty Free – the euphemistically implied savings are rendered useless by fees and gouging profits of the operators – so pass! Then, after the much-awaited hugs and kisses of greeters and family, comes the mind-bending labyrinthine puzzle of the English multi-story car park. The spaces are so tightly packed you couldn’t fit a cigarette paper between cars, let alone open a door, my aging girth not helping the exercise.

Driving a right-hand-drive car with a stick after forty years requires mental as well as manual dexterity but it’s just like riding a bike – maybe. After paying the parking fee, worthy of a mortgage, you’re disgorged onto the airport access roads where you may well disappear up your own exhaust pipe and end up on an even bigger parking lot – the dreaded M25!!

What was originally designed in the ‘80s as an outer ring road around London, offering the benefit of a 35-minute ride from Heathrow to the northern reaches of Surrey, took 2 ½ hours! A couple of accidents had rendered the whole thing a parking lot – it was like the night before Christmas – nothing moved except tempers and blood pressures. Google maps offered alternatives at the next exit so we followed the Conger line through streets hitherto never discovered. It’s been four years since I visited and the roads are in such terrible shape it would have been smoother to go off-road! Seriously, they are dangerous to the point of tearing up tires, crumbling suspension systems (I rented a car for the duration and the wheels bore testament to a very rough life) and when undertaken in my sister-in-law’s Mini, the prospect of bodily injury was never far away. Surrey is one of the richest counties in the UK and they have the worst, least maintained roads in the whole country.

Over the course of my stay, I came to the observation that the motorist is treated as a societal pariah; parking is almost nonexistent and when it is, it’s outrageously expensive – a trip to the supermarket involves a multi-story car park costing about a fiver for the stay. You then have to pay a pound to ‘rent’ a cart for shopping, rebated when it’s returned to its proper place in the parking lot. It’s as though the town doesn’t want you there. Small wonder towns are withering. There’s much more to observe about the trip. Watch this space.