Alain de Botton – who “bit our arms off to be involved in the project,” according to a Heathrow spokeswoman – is spending this week in Terminal 5, “seated at a desk and tapping away at his laptop computer [with his] typing appear[ing] in real time on a screen behind him.” His observations will be condensed into a short book to appear next month. The idea seems to be to get the wider world saying something, anything, about the London air hub other than that it’s a crowded, chaotic mess.