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2005-12-02 - 6:25 p.m.

Come fly from me

What might the late George Best soon have in common with Leonardo Da Vinci, John Lennon and Lech Walesa? If you answered that they have all been deemed suitable subjects of a Ben Elton musical, then you'd be way off. The answer is that they have all had airports named after them � the latter three now immortalised via the medium of overcrowded terminals at Rome, Liverpool and sunny Gdansk respectively.

George 'Fifth Beatle' Best has just been mooted by former Belfast Lord Mayor Jim Rodgers as a suitable personification for their city's airport � surely only one step below actual canonisation in these modern, travel-loving times? He's in exalted company as well, brushing runways with the likes of John F Kennedy, Pope John Paul II, Frederic Chopin and Charles de Gaul. If nothing else, that makes for an interesting dinner party guest list.

If you're in the business of paying tribute, I think you could go one further, though. The ultimate honour? Transform the airport in to a George Best-themed air transportation hub. The runways would be done up as football pitches, with planes having to perform dazzling snaking taxi manoeuvres on take off. Management would adopt a strict code of only employing blonde dolly birds, and Duty Free would just consist of endlessly bubbling towers of champagne glasses. It's what he would have wanted.

Bear in mind that paying homage works on a sliding scale. Most of us will be lucky to get a park bench with our name on it after we go, let alone huge, internationally recognised destinations. Those slightly less than A-list, in the meantime, might warrant only certain parts of airports named after them: RunWayne Rooney, ChecK-ingsley Amis and of course, Lionel BlAir Traffic Control.

Surely for the sake of efficiency, though, we should be naming airports after celebrities who already have the place as part of their name? Imagine the thrill of catching the red-eye into Whitney Houston, taxiing out of Dusty Springfield, sitting in the warm passenger lounge of Sofia Loren, a long lay-over at Denzil Washington, or, god forbid, being strip searched at Paris Hilton. Could you even go so far as Havana Kournikova, Phnom Sean Penh and Nairobi Williams? I think the answer has to be a firm 'probably not'.

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