TERMINAL TALES
It’s the end for Wales’s entirely imaginary Llandegley International airport, and the final boarding call for Paris’s Terminal Man
IMAGINARY AIRPORT
For 20 years, anyone travelling eastwards along the A44 between Rhayader and Kington, in Powys, Wales, would have been surprised to find an official-looking sign directing drivers to Terminals 1 and 3 of the otherwise unheard of Llandegley International airport. Follow the directions though, and they lead to an unremarkable field on the edge of the small village of the same name rather than an international transport hub.
The sign was erected by Nicholas Whitehead, a former editor of the Radnor edition of the Brecon and Radnor Express, who once wrote comedy with Terry Jones of Monty Python. “It started off as a wild conversation with friends one evening in Llandegley,” he said. “We thought of renting a sign for something that wasn’t really there, possibly a project that didn’t exist, and we settled on the airport. It started off as a bit of a joke, then we realised it was actually possible. It was made by Wrexham Signs, given the OK, one thing led to another and there it is.”
The sign is much loved by both locals and tourists and has a wider audience too, with thousands of followers on Facebook and Twitter who engage in imaginative exchanges about daily goings on at the “airport” and indulge in conspiracy theories about the “secret” terminal 2. Whitehead paid for the sign to be erected and for its maintenance, which he estimates has cost him £25,000 over the last 20 years but has now decided its time to call it a day. “I think the airport is established now – and I think the Establishment should take it on,” he says. “It’s not exactly a national monument – but it is a national treasure.” He hopes the Welsh government heritage body Cadw will take over responsibility for the airport. BBC News, 13 Nov 2022.
TERMINAL MAN DEPARTS
Fortean Times covered the story of Mehran Karimi Nasseri in 1990 (FT56:8), when he first came to public attention after it was discovered he had been living in terminal 2F of Roissy Charles de Gaulle airport near Paris since 1988. He was then calling himself “Alfred Mehran” and claiming to be a Scot.
Originally from the Iranian province of Khuzestan, where he was born in 1945, Nasseri had come to Europe to find his mother, but lacking proper immigration documents had been expelled from Belgium, the UK, the Netherlands and Germany before arriving at Charles De Gaulle airport and being refused entry to France.
Trapped in diplomatic limbo, unable to enter France or leave for another country, he took up residence in the terminal building. Attempts to help him move on, with both France and Belgium offering him residency, were thwarted when he refused to sign the papers, as they listed him as being Iranian rather than British and did not show his preferred name, “Sir Alfred Mehran”. He had always claimed his mother was Scottish and that he was actually British, not Iranian, although he could provide no documentary proof of either. France eventually granted him refugee status in 1999, but by then he preferred to remain in the airport, staying there until he was taken to hospital for an illness in 2006. He spent his days sitting on a red bench on the lower floor of Terminal 1, surrounded by trolleys of possessions, writing about his life in notebooks and reading.
His story made him a minor media celebrity, but his profile rocketed in 2004 when Steven Spielberg made a film, The Terminal, based on his story and starring Tom Hanks, and as a result his autobiography, The Terminal Man, was published the same year. The money he got from the film and book enabled him to live in hostels in Paris after he left hospital, although he eventually returned to Roissy Charles de Gaulle airport in September 2022, dying there a few weeks later of a heart attack, aged 76. BBC News, Guardian, 13 Nov 2022.