Airport hotels are meant to be a penance. You book them because the alternative is a five o’clock alarm and the M4, and you brace for a narrow bed, a kettle and a view of a car park. The Hilton Garden Inn sitting between Terminals 2 and 3 declined to play along. The room is big enough to pace about in, the bed is a proper one, and were it not for the small matter of an aircraft I would have been perfectly content to stay put.
Security was fast, which is the entire point of fast track, though nobody involved seemed especially delighted to see me. I suspect abruptness is an occupational condition when your working day consists largely of other people’s hand luggage. In any case I was through before it could curdle into anything worse.
Which brings us to the lounge, and to the confession that I had booked myself business class to Philadelphia with British Airways. This buys a shorter queue at one end and a flat bed at the other, and I was looking forward to both rather more than a grown man probably should. It also buys the lounge, where everything is free and one’s willpower is correspondingly absent. I began with a few cokes. Then sausage, bacon and scrambled egg. Then a fruit bowl of a size more usually described as a centrepiece, then a coffee, in an order no nutritionist would put his name to. The fruit was a gesture towards virtue. The brown sauce rather gave the game away.
There is, as always, work to finish that will not wait for the Atlantic, and there are worse places to finish it. It did get finished, all of it, which I record here chiefly so the fruit bowl is not left standing as the day’s only evidence of discipline. Two beers followed, at an hour when a beer is technically a lapse and practically a tradition.
And now, seat 7A. Club World has doors now, which turns a seat into something closer to a small room. A screen, a side console, a glass on its coaster, and a panel that slides across to shut out the aisle and everyone standing in it. I closed it immediately.
The welcome glass was very good indeed, and I would have guessed Veuve. I would have been wrong. Since the start of this month British Airways has been pouring an English sparkling wine in Club World, a Gusbourne grown in Kent and made for the airline, which improves the joke considerably. Not champagne at all. Britain quietly insisting on itself at thirty five thousand feet.
The menu keeps it up. Pea and mint soup, Loch Fyne smoked salmon, a short rib and ale cottage pie, a hot cherry Bakewell, and a cheeseboard running Coastal Cheddar, Shropshire Blue and Somerset Camembert. The tea page cheerfully describes the ritual as being about as British as British Airways, which is either charming or circular depending on how much sleep one has had. So here I am, crossing the Atlantic to mark two hundred and fifty years since this country stopped being in charge over there, and BA has chosen to send me off with a cottage pie and a slice of Bakewell. I find I rather approve.
There is a second tier of work in the bag, the less urgent sort, and near enough eight hours of ocean in which to get through it. We shall see which of us wins.
Border control was less charming. The officer wanted to know where I was from, what I do, why I had come and where I was staying, and I delivered every answer in the manner of a man with something to hide, which is invariably the effect of having nothing to hide. Nerves invite questions. Questions produce more nerves. When I explained that I was here with a group for America’s two hundred and fiftieth, he observed that there seemed to be rather a lot of us. Thirty or so, I said, which did not help. He then pointed out that the celebrations had come and gone some three weeks ago, and so I found myself explaining the concept of a Masonic programme to a man with a queue building behind me.
An Uber took us to the Airbnb, an enormous old town house with room for ten of us and a good deal more character than a hotel would have managed. I secured a good bedroom on the principle that these things go to whoever puts his bag down first.
Then to Monk’s Café for a few beers, where two things caught my attention. The first was a sign asking politely that nobody bring a gun inside, which tells you rather precisely which country you are standing in. The second was the bill. The barman took my card and kept it behind the bar while we ran up a tab. At the end he charged it by some process I neither witnessed nor authorised, handed it back, and when I asked how to leave a tip, told me to sign a receipt for the amount already billed and write the tip on underneath. I am an accountant by profession, and I have been quietly troubled ever since by the question of when exactly I agreed to any of it.
Dinner was at La Fontana della Città, where about fifteen of us gathered and I had a carbonara rather better than it needed to be. After which, nightlife, at eleven o’clock, on a Sunday. Philadelphia obliged.
We found McGillin’s Olde Ale House down a narrow alley, which turns out to be the oldest continuously operating tavern in the city, pouring since 1860. It was heaving. There was karaoke, and the karaoke was magnificently, unimprovably bad. Half the room was in Phillies shirts, the Phillies having just put eleven runs past the Yankees a few blocks away, and into the middle of this walked a party in full black tie. Flags on every wall, baseball caps, sports shirts, dinner jackets, and a few feet away two young men making free with Garth Brooks in front of a room that neither minded nor noticed. We worked out that taking a table and waiting for a server was quicker than standing at the bar, drank Coronas, and left at one in the morning. I liked it enormously.
The officer at the airport had assured me the celebrations were over. Five hours later I was in a bar that predates the Civil War, among several hundred people who had plainly not been informed.
Charlton Krentz 