It’s been a while since my days of constant international business travel; I’d forgotten just what a pleasure it can be.

In recent weeks, a pan-European project has taken me on multiple day-trips, and all my fondest memories have flooded back. Especially over the past 24 hours, as a French Air Traffic Control strike left me stranded in Barcelona. More specifically, in Barcelona airport.

So, while they’re fresh, here’s a collection of Rutherford’s Laws of Air Travel. Let me know your suggestions. (We’ll build the definitive user guide for those foolhardy enough to follow us.)

The Arrival-Departure Inverse: the earlier you are for your flight, the greater the likelihood that it will be delayed.

The Arrival-Departure Revelation: only after you have checked-in will the airline tell you that your flight has been delayed.

The Arrival-Departure Corollary: the later you are for your flight, the greater the chance that:

A) it will be on time;

B) the person in front of you, when asked if they have been given anything to include their luggage, will answer “yes – duelling pistols”;

C) you’ll choose the security queue in which everyone ahead of you has a pin in their leg.

Doc Marten’s Inspection Relationship: the longer the laces on your shoes, the more likely you will be asked to take them off at security.

The Exposed Toe Multiplier: raises the Doc Marten Inspection Relationship to 1:1 when you have a hole in your sock.

The Intel 20: the number of signs, pictures, videos and verbal reminders needed to ensure that the man with six frequent flyer gold cards takes his laptop out of his case for X-ray.

M C Escher’s First Law of Airport Design: the destination sign-posted at the bottom of a staircase is never sign-posted at the top.

M C Escher’s Second Law of Airport Design: never give customers in Terminal coffee shops  line of sight of the information display boards.

The “Are We Having Fun” Rule: the longer you wait for your cancelled flight, the more people you will see on their way to their holiday destinations.

The No-Turning-Back Probability Calculation: the longer the escalator, the greater the chance that you are on the wrong one headed to the wrong gate. The probability gets closer to 1.0 the nearer you are to departure time.

The Scargill Power Union: all batteries run down at the same rate, whether or not each device is in use. At the moment your mobile cuts out – aka the moment you need to your office / Client / home – your Blackberry, laptop and mp3 player will shut down in sympathy.

Tic Tac Toe Paradigm: when the plane is half empty, the seat allocation system will always put you with two other people to complete a row of three.

The Law of Temporary Innumeracy: all people are rendered number blind when entering a plane; if you have seat 19C, you will attempt to sit in 18C or 20C, because for the duration of you journey 19 will cease to exist as an intellectual construct.

The Sound-Distance Constant: one screaming child for every 250 miles flown in Economy.

The Travis Bickle “Looking at Me” Calculation: distance from airport to destination (miles) x duration spent in taxi (minutes) = number of times you will see the driver glare at you in his rear-view with bloodshot eyes .

The Travis Bickle Conversion Rate: 1 “Looking at Me” glare = 1 unit of local currency . The total “Looking at Me” payment is made as a gratuity for letting you out of the car without physical harm.

The Hour-Minute Co-efficient: the hour in which you arrive at your hotel (based on the 24 hour clock) determines the number of minutes you must walk to your room. Arrivals on or after 00h00 usually sleep in reception.

The Sweaty Collar Certainty: when you have an enforced overnight stay – and you need your only shirt laundered –  you will discover that you have arrived on a little known public holiday, and that the laundress has taken the evening off. Along with the kitchen staff.

KEY TERMS FOR FUTURE REFERENCE

Boarding: we’d like you to stand in a queue and watch passengers disembark from the flight you’ll be getting on when we’ve cleaned it in about 20 minutes

Estimated Time of Departure: we really have no idea, but the system won’t accept a blank field

Gate Closes: gate will still be open (unless you’re 10 seconds late, when it means ‘the gate has already closed, and no amount of negotiation or charm will get you on the flight. Have a nice day.’)

On the day his appointment was announced, I was in Terminal 3, on my way to Stockholm. So here’s my immediate take on the subject. I doubt BAA will want to sponsor me.)

For all their polish, pomp and circumstance, airports are really nothing more than meat processing plants.  Forget the glamour and excitement – as the cannibals would say, you are a long-pig with luggage.

Like a process-engineered version of Dante’s Inferno, there are three circles of hell through which you must pass to achieve the very reason for your visit, to whit, boarding a plane. So sophisticated and devious have the architects and designers become in their black craft, that these stepping stones to the world have seemingly become destinations in their own right.

(Indeed, I know someone who proudly boasts to have visited every international airport in the US, in some cases deliberately diverting his route – at considerable cost in time and money –  to complete his quest. Then again, at one point he had also visited all 92 Football League grounds, often without a match being played, so we won’t take him as the norm. Or normal.)

The ingenuity of these halls of Beelzeebub is their ability to distract you from their real purpose. You may be presented with overt messages about Efficiency, Security and Pleasure, but subliminal goal is far more invidious: to strip you and your fellow travellers of all sense of personal identity and free will.

As Dante would have it, abandon hope all ye who enter here.

CIRCLE THE FIRST: The Coding Hall

Check-in: cavernous, functional, shining like a kitchen in a glossy magazine, a seething mass of bodies fighting for space. Everyone in a hurry. You are a wo/man on a mission.

The first circle is designed to disabuse you of this self-delusion. You are about to entrust your soul to others, and you must do as you are told. This will be a personal transformation, from complex being filled with hopes, dreams and aspirations to a carbon-based logistics packet.

If you’re old enough to remember ‘The Prisoner’, you’ll recall Patrick McGoohan’s mantra “I am not a number”. Airport designers have seen through this, recognising that even abstract digits have meaning (a birthday, a phone call, unlucky 13), which would be a lifeline back to your sense of self. So at check-in, you are transformed into a barcode.

From Freddie or Janet or Suzy or John to thin-black, thick-white, thick-black, thin-white, thin-black… You have no more individual identity than a shrink-wrapped steak on a supermarket shelf.

In recent years, the dehumanizing process has gone a stage further, with the introduction of e-tickets and self-check-in (a clue in itself: any term with two hyphens is most certainly the work of the devil).

In keeping with the times, airports now ‘empower’ us to remove our own soul. The smiling, reassuring face of the desk clerk has been replaced with touch-screen pods that guide you through the  eight steps to a seat, including probing security questions like ‘could anyone have tampered with your luggage without your knowledge?’ – a conundrum to keep the most capable philosophical mind engaged for the rest of the journey.

Get to the end of this test, and you’re in the system. Onto the next level – the airport equivalent of crossing the River Styx.

CIRCLE THE SECOND: The Disrobing Portal

Great interrogators know that the way to the truth is an indirect path. Similarly, the servants of the Prince of Darkness know that before they completely strip you of all identity, they must reinforce negative aspects of your personality, so that – at the moment of transformation – you give up everything willingly.

They achieve this by playing on your conscience. Air travel is, indeed, a guilt trip.

From the moment you take your boarding pass from the check-in pod, you are subject to forces of scrutiny that would make St Francis have doubts about his motives with animals. You are a suspect, and over the next half an hour you will question every action leading up to this journey.

Notice that YOU will question. The sophistication of the technique is masterful. There are no shining lights, no spills under fingernails, no water torture. Just a sly second glance at your boarding pass, a doubtful ‘hmmm?’ as you try to make a joke with an official,another check of your nine year-old passport photo, and you’re willing to confess to every cross-border crime on Interpol’s “Most Wanted” list.

In the midst of this, as a diversion to really throw your sense of self into a tailspin, you are asked to remove all liquids from your hand-luggage. The ignominy is not the removal; rather, it is having to place them into a sandwich bag which you carry before you, a bottled insight into your personal habits.

The doubts about your guilt are now joined by an overwhelming sense that everyone can see you have a dandruff issue, two deodorants, and an ointment that comes with its own applicator.

“Guilty until proven innocent, guilty until proven innocent” the voice in your head is shouting. Which is just where you’re meant to be, because then the priests take over.

In their green shirts and latex gloves, they are the judge and jury of The Disrobing Circle. With gentle authority, they offer to take away the pain by taking away the objects of personal identification: the items that make you ‘You’, and all that you have done wrong in your life.

Your coat, your jacket,your belt and, most importantly, your shoes. There is nothing – NOTHING – quite so levelling as standing in socks in a public place, and realising that the tip of your big toe is showing.

Your watch, your computer, your Blackberry. And through the nakedness and vulnerability, comes relief. For a moment, you are free – from schedules and emails and text messages; from having to chase the incompetent and answer to the insecure.

You are free, and willing to give yourself up completely.

You wait while the priestess at the screening monitor takes an inexplicably long time looking at YOUR bag. What can she see? Did you forget to take out your nail clippers? Is taking a water pistol to the office such a good idea?

The priests on the other side of the portal beckon you forward. You have removed all items of metal, save for your fillings, but you still hold your breath as you walk through.

And sure enough an alarm sounds. Instinctively, your hands go forward, ready for the ‘cuffs. This is the key moment. Everything that has gone before has been ritual, everything that follows will be reinforcement. But in this moment, your fate is in the hands of a man or woman with the power to damn you for eternity.

You are asked to stretch your arms outward. It is a symbolically charged position. You are then patted from head-to-toe, as the priest looks for your sense of self-worth. Occasionally, he or she will use a whining wand, which will be waved over you seeking your will.

And then, it is over. You have passed through. You are cleansed.

You collect the accoutrements from the previous world, but now they are no more than items of convenience, devoid of all identification. They are without meaning. You may pass into the final circle.

CIRCLE THE THIRD: The Chamber of Consumption

Inevitably, such a process leaves you feeling empty. The physical stress can result in hunger, the psychological damage cries out for a new sense of identity.

The architects understand that better than they understand planning regulations, and so they have created an emporium of entertainment to give you comfort and solace.

You can shop.

Coffees and crepes and cakes. Sandwiches, salads and side-orders. Breakfast, lunch, dinner and tea.

Perfumes and papers and pearls. Cameras and cognacs and chocolate. Duty-free and conscience-free, you can shop ’til they shut the gate.

Sit and watch fellow travellers as they kill time in a permanent amble, lost souls drifting from outlet to outlet, without purpose, without reason – other than to rebuild a sense of self through consumption:

“We never thought we needed a sonic toothbrush, but with a £30 tax saving, you can’t say no, can you?”

“Don’t you think Champagne” – that’s a six year-old child, not a drink – “would benefit from a waxing kit?”

“Well, a 50-inch plasma must fit in the overhead bins, otherwise they wouldn’t sell them.”

The key to the success of air-side retail is that it one-step removed from daily life. There are no Matalan or Argos stores here; every brand is upwardly mobile, as befits the direction of your flight.

Like the planes overhead waiting to land, so you circle in a holding pattern, waiting for the hours to pass and your boarding to be displayed. You might buy an ‘airport’ edition of a novel that you’ll never finish, another adapter plug that you will again leave in your hotel room, or a third medio cappuccino that will later add to your jetlag woes.

And while you tap away at your mobile or watch the football in the bar, consider these (contradicatory) problems:

If were so “time-poor” why do we waste so much of it doing this (where ‘this’ = nothing)?

And in all the schooling, university education, on-the-job training and personal development that we’ve received, why have we never learned the fine art of waiting?