"Дуглас Адамс. The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul" - читать интересную книгу автора

Airports are ugly. Some are very ugly. Some attain a degree of ugliness
that can only be the result of a special effort. This ugliness arises
because airports ane full of people who are tired, cross, and have just
discovered that their luggage has landed in Murmansk (Murmansk airport is
the only known exception to this otherwise infallible rule), and
architects have on the whole tried to reflect this in their designs.
They have sought to highlight the tiredness and crossness motif with
brutal shapes and nerve jangling colours, to make effortless the business
of separating the traveller for ever from his or her luggage or loved
ones, to confuse the traveller with arrows that appear to point at the
windows, distant tie racks, or the current position of Ursa Minor in the
night sky, and wherever possible to expose the plumbing on the grounds
that it is functional, and conceal the location of the departure gates,
presumably on the grounds that they are not.

Caught in the middle of a sea of hazy light and a sea of hazy noise,
Kate Schechter stood and doubted.
All the way out of London to Heathrow she had suffered from doubt. She
was not a superstitious person, or even a religious person. she was simply
someone who was not at all sure she should be flying to Norway. But she
was finding it increasingly easy to believe that God, if there was a God,
and if it was remotely possible that any godlike being who could order the
disposition of particles at the creation of the Universe would also be
interested in directing traffic on the M4, did not want her to fly to
Norway either. All the trouble with the tickets, finding a next-door
neighbour to look after the cat, then finding the cat so it could be
looked after by the next-door neighbour, the sudden leak in the roof, the
missing wallet, the weather, the unexpected death of the next-door
neighbour, the pregnancy of the cat - it all had the semblance of an
orchestrated campaign of obstruction which had begun to assume godlike
proportions.
Even the taxi-driver - when she had eventually found a taxihad said,
"Norway? What you want to go there for?" And when she hadn't instantly
said, "'The aurora borealis!" or "Fjords!" but had looked doubtful for a
moment and bitten her lip, he had said, "I know, I bet it's some bloke
dragging you out there. Tell you what, tell him to stuff it. Go to
Tenerife."
There was an idea.
Tenerife.
Or even, she dared to think for a fleeting second, home.
She had stared dumbly out of the taxi window at the angry tangles of
traffic and thought that however cold and miserable the weather was here,
that was nothing to what it would be like in Norway.
Or, indeed, at home. Home would bc about as icebound as Norway right
now. Icebound, and punctuated with geysers of steam bursting out of the
grnund, catching in the frigid air and dissipating bctween the glacial
cliff faces of Sixth Avenue.
A quick glance at the itinerary Kate had pursued in the course of her
thirty years would reveal her without any doubt to be a New Yorker. For
though she had lived in the city very little, most of her life had been