The sixth floor of the Holiday Inn at Santiago de Chile’s international airport is an ideal place in which to savour anonymity. From my room I can look down on the runway, the planes neatly docked in their aprons like Dinky toys. The hotel itself, a non-place for world travellers, offers its guests a veneer of self-conscious transience, and a restaurant where we might consume generic world cuisine in a habitat devoid of any specific cultural reference. As though both to confirm and deny this sense of displacement, the hotel lobby displays a full range of multi-coloured ‘Welcome’ signs in around a hundred languages. I am reminded of the words of the erstwhile British Prime Minister, Theresa May, about citizens of the world being citizens of nowhere, and wonder if I share with my compatriots in Nowhereland that sad brand of homelessness of which she warned, characterised by frustration, lack of purpose and despair.

Alone in my hotel room, I can see everything going on down below: the passengers queuing at the carpark pay-booth; others dragging their wheelie suitcases across the tarmacadam towards the straggling expanse of Brutalist concrete buildings that house the Departures Hall… and if I were to open the window – which I cannot, presumably to prevent me from hurling myself earthward in horror at my own anomie – I would no doubt be able to smell the fumes of the petroleum-laden day. Like almost everything else, modern travel is a consumerist project. The gringo in the foyer with his Swedish cargo pants and Italian hiking boots, ready to head off into the ...