Before the environment was invented as a cause, we had to make do with Conservative bigotry to protect us from error. Appalled at the prospect of proletarians enjoying democratic travel, Victorian social critic John Ruskin mused on the rapacious penetration of a railway into the hitherto virgin Peak District in the north of England.
He boomed that the sole advantage to be gained from this "progress" was that every fool in the town of Birmingham could be in the town of Buxton and every fool in Buxton could be in Birmingham.
Sometimes at Heathrow Airport, I get an inkling of what he meant. Why is it always someone in front of me who wants to take a fridge-freezer on as hand baggage?
Acutely aware of the heavier-than-air formula and thrust-to-weight relationships, why are my flights always full of golfers with bags the weight of corpses? Ruskin's train of fools has become a plane of fools. And there are lots of takers.
Within 10 years, the culture of air travel has changed completely. Is it a Golden Age or one made of nasty pollutants? British Airways (now quaintly known as a "legacy" airline in the travel industry demotic) used to retain traces of the Imperium's tastes, hierarchies and disciplines. It was high-tech colonialism, adventure and paternalism executed by nerveless middle-class men of military stature.
A small inheritance allowed the 20th century woman who pioneered solo female traveling, Freya Stark, to buy her first air ticket: She was wrapped in sheepskins and bundled next to the pilot without even being strapped in. She described it as one of her best experiences.
Low cost has turned romance and adventure into ordeal. People used to get dressed up to fly. Now they dress down. Way, way down, as shocked aesthetes surviving Gatwick North at four in the morning can testify.
I recently asked: "How long is this flight?"
"Dunno, love," came the answer.
More air travel means worse air travel, but once you have let the genie of access out of the box, it is as difficult to put him back in as re-packing a partially inflated escape slide with one hand. What was once the rare indulgence of a privileged elite has become everyday.
When I was a child in Liverpool, in the northwest a visit to nearby Speke Airport's Art Deco building gave a thrilling sense of connection with the possibilities of Modernism. Strange to say how they have now been so completely realized not by Le Corbusier, but by easyJet. That same child used to go on a 30km drive to the coastal town of Southport as a weekend treat. Now people in Liverpool go to Barcelona for the weekend. Not, perhaps, to connect with Antoni Gaudi or Ildefonso Cerda, but because Catalonia is cheaper and just as accessible as the Lancashire coast.
The problem with air travel is the problem with culture in general, at least as identified by that famous American man of letters George Santayana: If profound and noble, it must remain rare; if common, it must become mean. When profound and noble, it used to cost several thousand dollars to go to New York; now it is as cheap as chips.
But these savings have their price. Certainly, in a well-organized life, an individual rarely encounters such frustration, degradation, inconvenience, authoritarianism, squalor, claustrophobia, humiliation, frustration, despair and fear as when he chooses to fly. And that is just in the airport, even before take off and the distant prospect of Sigmet (the nasty abbreviation for "significant meteorological activity").
Nobel-prize winning novelist Elias Canetti reflected: "How quickly has flight, this age-old and precious dream, lost every charm, lost every meaning, lost its soul?"
But the traveling public has made a Mephistophelian bargain with the low-cost airlines. In exchange for undignified privations willingly suffered, Bratislava and Split are only keystrokes away. It is a bargain the multitude enjoys, leaving a fastidious minority to explore the options at the other end of the market where good business is done selling super-luxury accommodation in wide-bodied jets designed for 300, but reconfigured for 48. And it is a bargain which, incidentally, leaves legacy carriers with their expensive "frills" holding on to the enormous, cavernously empty middle ground.
Is this orgy of online, no-frills, e-ticket, carry-on, cargo pant and backpack excess going to continue indefinitely? Will no third-level, weed-pocked provincial or retired military airport in a forgotten European province be free from opportunism and iPods? Demand continues to climb, but there are economic and cultural reasons to predict a ceiling.
First, as the low-cost airlines become monopolies, there will be pressures to raise prices, not least because expansion into more profitable long-haul is not feasible since the business model depends on the rapid turnarounds only possible within Europe.
Second, the perversity of human nature means we have not so much the world in our hands, but le monde al'envers. The sophisticated traveller will perhaps fly less, confirming the maxim that travel does not broaden the mind, but narrows it.
In a backstreet restaurant in Nice, I became curious about an incongruous English couple. I asked them the how and the why. They explained that they had been driving to B&Q, but decided to go to East Midlands Airport instead. Two hours later, my dream of being Graham Greene had evaporated.
But there is a more important reason why the modern package of technology and democracy will lose its luster. Already, it seems ridiculous for "executives" to sit in aluminum tubes in order to meet other executives in faceless airport hotel conference rooms when they could do it online: It is a Buxton and Birmingham transaction on a colossally stupid scale.
The principle of no such thing as a free lunch applies not just to no-thrills inflight catering, but to no-frills travel itself. The worst place to dump destructive carbon is at the same height modern aeroplanes are most comfortable to fly. At 10,670m, your cheap trip is doing very expensive, possibly irreversible, damage to the atmosphere that protects the planet.
Yet the romance of flight tends to overcome even the sternest objections. British writer Rose Macaulay wrote about "winging through a heaven of sunshine, with cushiony billows floating below, a feather bed of the gods." Yes, that reference to the gods does get you away from the Midlands airport of Stansted nicely. We have saved so much on the ticket that we can afford to pay the environmental bill tomorrow. I gather Ryanair starts flying to Fez in October. Now there's somewhere I've always wanted to go.
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