conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Provide a description for a book titled A Week at the Airport about Travel, Having, British with the genre: Engineering & Transportation, Transportation.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Travel writer de the author sees the airport as the nexus of all that plagues and fascinates us about modern life: environmental destruction, high technology, constant movement, glittering distractions, consumerist temptations, and social interaction and isolation. Having accepted an invitation from British Airways to spend a week at its home, Terminal 5 of Heathrow, he is given unprecedented access to all the parts of the airport that travelers dont generally see. So, along with the shopping areas and arrival and departure and baggage-claim areas, he wanders into the huge stations for airplane repairs, the vast storage areas for rejected samples for cabin paraphernalia, the behind-the-scene offices, and the massive food-preparation areas. From a desk announcing his position as writer in residence, de the author engages in conversations with business travelers, parting lovers, vacationing families, and the myriad workersstationary and passing throughfor whom the airport is workplace. Author of the best-selling The Art of Travel (2002), de the author is amusing and lyrical in his observations of our modern comings and goings. Photographs add to the allure of this engaging look at air travel. --Vanessa Bush
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Delete the last sentence.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Travel writer de the author sees the airport as the nexus of all that plagues and fascinates us about modern life: environmental destruction, high technology, constant movement, glittering distractions, consumerist temptations, and social interaction and isolation. Having accepted an invitation from British Airways to spend a week at its home, Terminal 5 of Heathrow, he is given unprecedented access to all the parts of the airport that travelers dont generally see. So, along with the shopping areas and arrival and departure and baggage-claim areas, he wanders into the huge stations for airplane repairs, the vast storage areas for rejected samples for cabin paraphernalia, the behind-the-scene offices, and the massive food-preparation areas. From a desk announcing his position as writer in residence, de the author engages in conversations with business travelers, parting lovers, vacationing families, and the myriad workersstationary and passing throughfor whom the airport is workplace. Author of the best-selling The Art of Travel (2002), de the author is amusing and lyrical in his observations of our modern comings and goings. Photographs add to the allure of this engaging look at air travel.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Provide the first four paragraphs for this book.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: A Week at the Airport
  The roof of the building weighed 18,000 tonnes, but the steel columns supporting it hardly suggested the pressures they were under. They were endowed with a subcategory of beauty we might refer to as elegance, present whenever architecture has the modesty not to draw attention to the difficulties it has surmounted. On top of their tapered necks, the columns balanced the 400-metre roof as if they were holding up a canopy made of linen, offering a metaphor for how we too might like to stand in relation to our burdens.
  Most passengers were bound for a bank of automatic check-in machines in the centre of the hall. These represented an epochal shift away from the human hand and towards the robot, a transition as significant in the context of airline logistics as that from the washboard to the washing machine had once been in the domestic sphere. However, few users seemed capable of producing the precise line-up of cards and codes demanded by the computers, which responded to the slightest infraction with sudden and intemperate error messages – making one long for a return of the surliest of humans, from whom there always remains at least a theoretical possibility of understanding and forgiveness.
  Nowhere was the airport's charm more concentrated than on the screens placed at intervals across the terminal which announced, in deliberately workmanlike fonts, the itineraries of aircraft about to take to the skies. These screens implied a feeling of infinite and immediate possibility: they suggested the ease with which we might impulsively approach a ticket desk and, within a few hours, embark for a country where the call to prayer rang out over shuttered whitewashed houses, where we understood nothing of the language and where no one knew our identities. The lack of detail about the destinations served only to stir unfocused images of nostalgia and longing: Tel Aviv, Tripoli, St Petersburg, Miami, Muscat via Abu Dhabi, Algiers, Grand Cayman via Nassau... all of these promises of alternative lives, to which we might appeal at moments of claustrophobia and stagnation.
  It was never far from Diane's thoughts how vulnerable her airline was to its employees' bad moods. On reaching home, a passenger would remember nothing of the plane that had not crashed or the suitcase that had arrived within minutes of the carousel's starting if, upon politely asking for a window seat, she had been brusquely admonished to be happy with whatever she was assigned – this retort stemming from a sense on the part of a member of the check-in team (perhaps discouraged by a bad head cold or a disappointing evening at a nightclub) of the humiliating and unjust nature of existence.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Provide another paragraph.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: The West once had a powerful and forgiving explanation for exclusion from any sort of lounge: for two thousand years Christianity rejected the notion, inherent in the modern meritocratic system, that virtue must inevitably usher in material success. Jesus was the highest man, the most blessed, and yet throughout his earthly life he was poor, thus by his very example ruling out any direct equation between righteousness and wealth. The Christian story emphasised that, however apparently equitable our educational and commercial infrastructures might seem, random factors and accidents would always conspire to wreck any neat alignment between the hierarchies of wealth on the one hand and virtue on the other. According to St Augustine, only God himself knew what each individual was worth, and He would not reveal that assessment before the time of the Last Judgement, to the sound of thunder and the trumpets of angels – a phantasmagorical scenario for non-believers, but helpful nevertheless in reminding us to refrain from judging others on the basis of a casual look at their tax returns.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Provide the last five paragraphs.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: I ordered my last commercially sponsored club sandwich in the hotel lounge. The planes were particularly loud as they passed overhead – so loud that as one MEA Airbus took off for Beirut, the waiter shouted, 'God help us!' in a way that startled me and my sole fellow diner, a businessman from Bangladesh en route to Canada.
  I worried that I might never have another reason to leave the house. I felt how hard it is for writers to look beyond domestic experience. I dreamt of other possible residencies in institutions central to modern life – banks, nuclear power stations, governments, old people's homes – and of a kind of writing that could report on the world while still remaining irresponsible, subjective and a bit peculiar.
  Travellers would soon start to forget their journeys. They would be back in the office, where they would have to compress a continent into a few sentences. They would have their first arguments with spouses and children. They would look at an English landscape and think nothing of it. They would forget the cicadas and the hopes they had conceived together on their last day in the Peloponnese.
  But before long, they would start to grow curious once more about Dubrovnik and Prague, and regain their innocence with regard to the power of beaches and medieval streets. They would have fresh thoughts about renting a villa somewhere next year.
  With many thanks to the following. At Mischief, Dan Glover (who had the idea), Charlotte Hutley and Seb Dilleyston. At BAA, Colin Matthews, Cat Jordan, Claire Lovelady and the Communications team, and Mike Brown and the Operations team. At Heathrow, Sofitel, British Airways, Gate Gourmet, the UK Border Authority and OCS. At Profile Books, Daniel Crewe, Ruth Killick and Paul Forty. Lesley Levene, Dorothy Straight and Fiona Screen for copy editing and proofreading. Richard Baker for the superlative images. Joana Niemeyer and David Pearson for the design. Caroline Dawnay and Nicole Aragi for the piloting. Charlotte, Samuel and Saul for another ruined August. In the text, some of the names have been changed to protect identities.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Swap the first and the last sentence.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: In the text, some of the names have been changed to protect identities. The planes were particularly loud as they passed overhead – so loud that as one MEA Airbus took off for Beirut, the waiter shouted, 'God help us!' in a way that startled me and my sole fellow diner, a businessman from Bangladesh en route to Canada.
  I worried that I might never have another reason to leave the house. I felt how hard it is for writers to look beyond domestic experience. I dreamt of other possible residencies in institutions central to modern life – banks, nuclear power stations, governments, old people's homes – and of a kind of writing that could report on the world while still remaining irresponsible, subjective and a bit peculiar.
  Travellers would soon start to forget their journeys. They would be back in the office, where they would have to compress a continent into a few sentences. They would have their first arguments with spouses and children. They would look at an English landscape and think nothing of it. They would forget the cicadas and the hopes they had conceived together on their last day in the Peloponnese.
  But before long, they would start to grow curious once more about Dubrovnik and Prague, and regain their innocence with regard to the power of beaches and medieval streets. They would have fresh thoughts about renting a villa somewhere next year.
  With many thanks to the following. At Mischief, Dan Glover (who had the idea), Charlotte Hutley and Seb Dilleyston. At BAA, Colin Matthews, Cat Jordan, Claire Lovelady and the Communications team, and Mike Brown and the Operations team. At Heathrow, Sofitel, British Airways, Gate Gourmet, the UK Border Authority and OCS. At Profile Books, Daniel Crewe, Ruth Killick and Paul Forty. Lesley Levene, Dorothy Straight and Fiona Screen for copy editing and proofreading. Richard Baker for the superlative images. Joana Niemeyer and David Pearson for the design. Caroline Dawnay and Nicole Aragi for the piloting. Charlotte, Samuel and Saul for another ruined August.I ordered my last commercially sponsored club sandwich in the hotel lounge.