Most of my great epiphanies have taken place in bus or rail stations or airport lounges.  I studied most of my degree while riding the tube or sitting in a laundrette.  I think I find something neuronally stimulating in the buzz and hum of human beings in transit. It's probably the place where the real emerges without the paraphernalia and bravado daily living demands of us. Maybe it's boredom or inertia, that sense of limbo. I don't know. Whatever - it's a kind of low level crisis of identity and I love observing it.

Of course, there's a host of materialistic delights to tempt you. The deeper the recession hits, the more we apparently idolise the remoteness of luxury and quality: gadgets, bags, make-up, gastronomical treats, DVDs, last minute everythings as if they can ever prepare you for the unpredictability which should be the main reason why we travel.

I dither about. I don't want to listen to my iPod; there's no music worth listening to anymore, nothing to shake us out of this torpor of 'positive thinking' into the trauma of truth. I don't want to read another magazine featuring a veteran rocker's retrospective or new releases or how some exhibitionist is revolutionising the world through Twitter. I need a book - but there's nothing I want to put into my head, no experience vital and fresh as a plucked orchid from some random crag - just words and anecdotes (like this) more fitted to a Facebook blog - a reading experience which leaves me stale, tired and feeling like a department store toilet.

Maybe I'm hungry. But I stare at the range of Pret a Manger sandwiches and 'real egg and mackerel pate'.  All I can really summon up any desire for is a cup of tea. My tastes don't seem to have changed in sixteen years. Yes, I know I should have got a Kindle so I could at least read Dante or War and Peace or 'The Fire Next Time' again or maybe I should get my laptop out, check my Blackberry.  Instead, I ponder on rationalising how a Rolex before tax costs more than two houses in Burnley.

But that's not why I'm here.

I travel to connect with something beyond me and this fairy tale of a world I and others concoct, calling it reality. Nothing can change an inherent quest for truth. It takes a strong mind, however, to be able to hold it's toxic taste. We automatically defend ourselves with truisms, platitutdes and positive thinking mantras. We are becoming less and less capable of processing unpleasant realitites and dealing with them honestly. I think I've only met three people who could effectively do so.

Youth used to be the barometer of truth. Untainted by the world's seductions and rationalisations, it reacted immediately to realities around them. But the powers-that-be have sorted that out now: destroy the real artists, the visionaries and executive creators, dupe youth with food, sex, drugs, drink and meaningless pap ('a spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down' except leave out the medicine) until all it wants is 'Glee', 'X Factor', a new computer game and to look like someone off The Hills.

Music is just a noise, a memory of times past. The visions of artists are crushed or voided. No one's saying anything. There's just the sound of silence. And the tap-tapping on a keypad.

But our lives are transitory. That's the whole point. Regardless of technology, plastic surgery and genetic engineering, we cannot make them permanent.  We can deny the existence of eternity and its significance but that will never make the ephemeral real or lasting.

I watch the board as flights are cancelled, delayed, take-off, gates open and close and see the suddeness and preciousness of now - worth more than anything else on offer here.