A while ago I was chosen to take part in the Liminal Residency which is a writing project that meets in liminal, abandoned or forgotten places. The idea of liminality has always appealed to me hugely, as there are various parts of my life that are extremely liminal, and the idea of liminality has also somehow become tagged onto what I'd term pro-Situ ideas, but maybe it always has been a part of it. Since I was given a choice I opted to attend the residency that took place at Heathrow Airport at the end of September.
I first went to Heathrow in 1978 when I was sixteen. It was the first time I'd flown, and I decided I liked, if not loved, flying. Something obviously happened, as when I returned to the airport in 1987 I was terrified. Terror lasted until I recently went to a conference in Italy and realised my panic couldn't control the plane, and I stopped worrying. So airports have been a source of joy and terror to me, but always excitement. I love reading the lists of places planes are flying to, always way more exotic than wherever I am off to. And why do people travel? According to Heathrow it's probably for very anodine reasons you can imagine - meeting a new member of the family, going on holiday, getting away from a (not very) broken heart. But I'm way more interested in everyone else's motives, actually.
Being treated as a writer was rather a lovely surprise for me - I'm usually doing the washing up or driving someone around or looking after people. Two and a bit days of being a writer was even better. As soon as we met and had introduced ourselves we were plunged into doing things, things I'd never heard of, going in a driverless pod to a car park, being shot around the airport in the dark, and being able to see a line of aircraft waiting to land, suspiciously close to wherever you were. It was fantastic. Then it was onto a bus, and visiting Myrtle Avenue, apparently the most popular plane spotting venue in the country. Plane spotting? Never heard of that, either. We stood on a diagonal path, right under the flight path, and planes took off, over our heads, and it was strange, but right where we should have been.
Premier Inn actually played a larger part in my life that weekend than I would have liked, although I love staying in hotels. I love the corridors that all look identical, I love the anonymity, I love the restaurants and the people you randomly meet. My window looked out onto the car park, which I suppose was highly suitable, and better still the entrance to the car park. I can imagine some people finding this to be a nightmare, but when I stayed in Italy I had a window that faced out onto a brick wall, and I doubt if E M Forster would have thought much of that.
The following day we had the first of our writer-led workshops. Sean Wai Keung made us look round Terminals Two and Three and find text, which was harder than it sounded - the lack of leaflets and maps, advertising junk which up until a few years ago was everywhere was suddenly gone, and so we took photos of text on our phones. My favourite was just the word 'help', which we all say at airports at some point along the way. In the afternoon I did my workshop which was about why people walk around, in a pub where highwaymen used to drink.
Why do people walk around? The easy answer is psychogeography, the urge in all of us to be affected by our surroundings, to be changed, transformed or repulsed by our environment. Personally I think that answer is the right one, but I suppose there might be as many answers as there are people. There were times during the weekend when I did way too much walking, pointless walking, seeing the same things time and time again - this was mostly in my journey to find the second Premier Inn that I was booked into. It's way too boring to explain all this, and it took hours, but eventually there I was, in another identikit hotel. With a view of the runway. I could have stayed there for hours watching the planes land, a distant noise hidden behind quadruple glazing. All those people coming back to something, or just starting their adventure. Walking around, going somewhere, ending up somewhere else.
We sat around Terminal Two late at night. Talked to a waitress, saw a mouse, a man sleeping on chairs. A woman who'd had chemo, a piano for people to play. The airport settling down for the night. A boy waiting around with a bunch of flowers at the arrivals area. Eventually she turned up. A story about a failed romance and some lies. This is what I'd come here for.
The next morning, our last day. Breakfast on my own. Went to a workshop by Dawn Hart about beekeeping, how bees from different countries have different characteristics. Mysterious behaviour that defies explanation, how bees die for the good of the hive. How you mark the Queen. It made me want to run out and get a beehive. Soon after Ed Garland told us about different sorts of sounds, again things I'd never thought of, a huge list of different sorts of sounds that makes you aware of and feel everything. And realising that all you can hear, in a Wetherspoons perched high above the check in, is well, not much. It should be an awful noisy place, but when you are there, you're cocooned. We went downstairs and I heard every sound in the world.
And then it was time to go. I hung around for a bit, watching it all. I hate leaving places, and this time I hated leaving here.
I hated leaving the anonymity and the peace to sit down and write something, the ability to think without much interruption. I went back to get my luggage, and looked at planes landing again. The bus turned up to take me to the terminal, and the bus driver started talking to me, telling me about his environmental concerns. By the end of the journey he'd progressed to telling me about Hollywood film stars drinking babies' blood. I was glad to leave that bit of the journey.
On the underground I had to start coming back to normality. A man reading a book. A boy talking into his phone, 'he's got to help me, I gave him my passport,' - yikes - stations that the train travelled through without stopping. Waterloo. Home.
When I came to writing I suddenly found that I was doing things writers did - a deadline, a wordcount. I wished I was back at Heathrow, living a sort of slightly bored, aimless existence, (and I know those words come from a Françoise Sagan novel) drinking coffee and looking at things aslant. I'm actually quite pleased with what I wrote, and the book we have contributed to is now available. And it's actually brilliant.
We didn't exist in limbo, as we had the fabulous Liminal Residency team looking after us, guiding our newness, encouraging us. Eloise Shepperd and Krishnan Coupland are both pretty amazing writers, and you can find their writing here and here. I'd been expecting to just loll around and watch people and drink coffee and scribble in a notebook. I wasn't prepared for the huge amount of work they'd put in, walking round the perimeter road (that took four and a half hours), charting the stories that Heathrow tells about itself and then prefers to maybe forget, negotiating the complexities of getting around the airport so that it was painless for us, finding out a plan of things that would press our buttons and make it all work. I've said to them both a dozen times the words thank you, but it's never enough.
They also chose us - myself, Dawn, Ed and Sean. We all have quite different skills as writers, Sean is a poet using techniques I've never heard of because I'm out of touch with most stuff, Ed writes essays and is a Ph.D student studying noise in fiction and Dawn brings together loss, fear and liminality in both fiction and poetry, sometimes sitting at tube stations for a month being a writer in residence. They're all amazing. When I read through the proofs of the book I kept seeing our traces where we'd heard something, or talked, or found out something. It felt like a special force which bound us together.
The Liminal Residency writes "We believe that meaningful ideas rarely occur while sitting at a desk trying to write, meaningful connections are rarely made in isolation, and that there is inherent value in stepping outside your comfort zone...It may involve difficulty, dislocation, boredom, intense excitement, loneliness or self-discovery. It is an intentionally uncomfortable and unpredictable experience." I felt all of those things during my time at Heathrow. Some pretty amazing things filtered through my brain as well, and have caused huge changes in me, and in a very good way I will never be the same again. One of those things is that, even though I knew I already was one, it told me that I'm a writer. Well obviously I am, or I wouldn't have been accepted, but it's incontrovertible now. That an airport could tell me that is all a bit mad really. The other writers certainly helped, and they were magnificent.
The next residency is being held at Alton Towers. Apply for it. Feel like crap, feel like Virginia Woolf - on a good day - or then again, maybe a bad one. Write about it. Write about the things that slip through the cracks, about the weirdness and the things that don't make sense. It'll be life changing.
Find out about it : The Liminal Residency
Buy the book : here
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