text: I'm a terminal lounge lizard
  There is a wonderful passage in The Fight, Norman Mailer’s classic account of the 1974 fight between Muhammad Ali and George Foreman in Kinshasa.
  Well, actually there are many wonderful passages in the book, but this
  particular one is my favourite. As Mailer flies home to the U.S., he describes the Zen-like feeling he experiences when flying, insulated from the world around him, completely removed from everything and everyone
  that surrounds him.
  There are always men who lounge around with their legs spread, talking as loudly as possible on their smartphones in the airport lounge
  I get a similar sensation whenever I enter an airport lounge, feeling cocooned and cossetted, hidden away from the outside world and the argy-bargy of the terminal, lost in a half-world of brown leather, diffused
  lighting, industrial espresso machines and invariably a large collection of customer magazines.
  This feeling isn’t just because of the free newspapers and peanuts either, as I can get equally giddy sitting quietly in the near-deserted departure gate of a North American airport, absent-mindedly watching the planes take off and quietly singing Peter, Paul And Mary songs to myself.
  The airport lounge is also home to some fairly generic stereotypes, the type of people you can be guaranteed to see every time you purposefully venture into one. Personally, I like to fold into an armchair and quietly work my way through the papers, trying to be as unobtrusive as possible.
  Unlike those men – and let’s face it, they are always men – who lounge around with their legs spread, talking as loudly as possible on their smartphones. These are men who don’t feel validated unless they’ve told the entire lounge about their latest business activity, in a methodical blow-by-blow fashion, usually asking the poor person on the other end a bunch of obviously unnecessary questions.
  A classic question would be something like, ‘And Jamie will be there to be pick me up in the Mercedes?’
  This achieves a variety of things: 1) It lets everyone know that not only is Mr Monogrammed Hand Luggage important enough to be picked up by a car, by his own driver, but also that he’s being picked up in a Mercedes! Ooh, get him!
  2) It undermines his assistant by micro-managing them, asking them to confirm they’ve done their job properly.
  3) And because he is wasting his assistant’s time, checking whether or not his car is picking him up, it confirms to all and sundry that he actually hasn’t got anything more important to do. Which makes the phone call something of a spectacular and very public own goal.
  Then there are the men whose self-control appears to evaporate as soon as they pass the bar.
  ‘What the hell,’ you can hear them thinking, ‘I know it’s only 8.30 in the morning, but I think I deserve a glass of champagne. No, on second thoughts, I think I deserve three.’
  Of course you do, and why not a quick BLT and a piece of cheesecake while you’re at it? These men are no different from the Illustrated Lager Louts in the public bars, who think nothing of sinking four pints and a sharpener before their mid-morning flight to Dubai.
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  The other loungecore cliché is Mr Laptop, or, these days, Mr iPad.
  This is the chap in the shorts and the Primal Scream T-shirt who isn’t happy unless the coffee table divider is covered in all the electronic bits and pieces he absolutely has to have for his journey: there’s just no way he can travel without the BlackBerry (for his emails), his Google phone (for those rare occasions when he isn’t being passive aggressive and actually wants to talk to someone), his iPad (for those attachments too big to open on the BlackBerry), his iPod (because he might want 20 minutes of Two Door Cinema Club, Grizzly Bear or Allen Toussaint on the plane), and of course his laptop (in case he wants to catch up on the last few episodes of Breaking Bad).
  Actually, apart from the shorts and the Primal Scream T-shirt (to paraphrase Tony Parsons, you only make a mark on your T-shirt if you can’t make a mark on your life), this last chap sounds a bit like me, although I might also have a Kindle, just to be even more annoying.
  For me, the airport lounge is sanctuary, no matter how many irritating people it attracts. I like them so much that I like to get to the airport with a few hours to spare, so I can finish my book, write a book, surf for gossip, or simply try to look grumpy enough to stop anyone sitting next to me.
  Unlike my wife, who likes to arrive at the airport as they’re about to close the hatch, I like to get there with enough time to read an entire copy of The New Yorker.
  In fact, note to self: next year, instead of ten days in France, what about ten days in Terminal 5? Honestly, the showers are amazing.
  Dylan Jones is the editor of GQ