Get it wrong though, and it just tastes like ketchup

In the same way that Arcade Fire are my favourite band, but Bruce Springsteen is my favourite performer, John Steinbeck is my favourite author but Douglas Adams is my favourite writer. The relevance is thus: John Steinbeck never wrote about the variety of emotions and mental states it is possible to feel in an airport.

Douglas Adams, on the other hand, was one of those worldly types, gallivanting all over the globe whilst insisting we do everything in our power to conserve species facing extinction. Somehow he managed to do this without sounding like a hypocrite. What you should do is read The Salmon of Doubt because it's got all the necessary quotes that I want to, uh, quote, and I can't be arsed to go googling them all now.

The point of this point is that he had a lot to say on the subject of bloody marys (Bloody maries? Who knows?). Or at least, as much as it is possible to say on that subject. Mainly that they are very much an airport drink. He didn't say as much, but speculating on his deceased behalf I would say a very significant proportion of the world's bloody maries are consumed in airports, at least compared to any other mixed drink. Is it an unconscious craving for the vitamins and nutrients that leach from your skin into the crisp, artificially-pressurised cabin air? I assume this combines with urge to blatter oneself into oblivion for the duration of the flight. Either due to fear of flying, or fear of Jennifer Aniston movies- which seem to be the cinematic equivalent of bloody maries: something most sane people will only indulge in when they're in the stateless void between customs checkpoints.

Perhaps it's political uncertainty- you pass through security and you're ready to fly anywhere in the world, at least until you arrive and have to contend with a new nation's customs and immigration. The feeling that you're between countries, and as such not subject to the behaviours you might normally exhibit in your home country, and are free from the self-restraint most people exercise in foreign countries, whose ways they are unfamiliar with. So you watch awful movies and drink things you might not normally drink.

But not me. I will drink bloody maries any time. I guess this is what it means to be an international citizen. What if this is what John and Yoko were on about the whole time? Good for them, I say...