Alain de Botton - Iyengar All Levels, Aug 21

From a contemporary thinker with a knack for making philosophy accessible, nuts enough to spend a week inside the the Heathrow airport (Remember airports…?); and write about the experience. The whole short, book is a gem!

A Week at the Airport, excerpted

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At moments when I could not make headway with my writing, I would go and chat to Dudley Masters, who was based on the floor t)dow me and had spent thirty years cleaning shoes at the airport. His day began at 8.30 a.m. and, around sixty pairs later, finished at 9.00p.m.

I admired the optimism with which Dudley confronted every new pair of shoes that paused at his station. Whatever their condition, he imagined the best for them, remedying their abuses with an armoury of brushes, waxes, creams and spray cleaners. He knew it was not evil that led people to go for eight months without applying even an all-purpose clear cream polish. He was like a kindly dentist who, on bringing down the ceiling-mounted halogen lamp and asking new patients to open their mouths ('Let's have a look in here, shall we?’), remains aware of how complicated lives can become and so how easily people may give up flossing their teeth while they try to save their companies or minister to a dying parent.

Though he was being paid to shine shoes, he knew that his real mission was psychological. He understood that people rarely have their shoes cleaned at random: they do so when they want to draw a line under the past, when they hope that an outer transformation may be a spur to an inner one…