SLEEPING and airports; it is a fraught relationship. In few places does a visit to the land of nod seem more appealing. Is there any state more catatonic than being air-side when your flight has been delayed for eight hours until gone midnight? Or when you have a lengthy layover halfway through a mammoth journey? There are only so many times you can stroll around the shops vacantly staring at leather belts; there are only so many Bloody Marys you can sup by yourself at the bar. Yet, few places are less conducive to getting some shut-eye. First there is the noisy stream of people. Then there are the ear-splitting tannoy announcements. But more than these, there is the rock-hard seating with razor-sharp armrests, whose only purpose is to stop you sprawling out and escaping the horror. In some countries sleep deprivation is a method of torture. At JFK it is civil engineering.



It has always been a mystery why airports seem so keen to stop you dozing off. (A few take things to extremes: Reykjavik even puts up signs explicitly forbidding flyers from attempting some shut-eye.) Perhaps they worry that the moment people stop moving they also stop buying duty-free. Maybe they think that a sprawling, snoring passenger will be a nuisance to those around him. They may just have never considered tired passengers’ needs. But Gulliver suspects that, like many in the commercial aviation business, they are merely sadists.



