Perhaps it was a date to the prom.

Or maybe the realtor. “They’re offering full price!”

Then again, you might be one of those lucky bums who once won the sweepstakes.

What’s the most exciting phone call you ever got?

I think I’d like to get the one author Alain de Botton received.

On the other end, an executive at London’s Heathrow Airport explained that he wanted to showcase their new concourse. Would de Botton please come write about it?

That’s right. Just hang out for a week. We’ll give you a desk in the middle of the hubbub, not to mention a hotel room adjacent to the airport. You may poke around the passenger lounges, the store rooms, the perfume outlets and the VIP lounges. Talk to the travelers, to the employees, whomever you like.

And write about it.

Yep, that’s the kind of phone call that would make me die of happiness.

Sad to say, I doubt I could produce a book as graceful as de Botton’s A Week at the Airport.

I was in an elementary school classroom this week. What I saw was children and music folders and xylophone mallets and hair braids and sneakers striped with hot reds and blues and oranges. De Botton, though, would have seen the pills the parents swallowed at home that morning. He would have seen whose family had to move back in with grandma and where Grandma came from. He would have seen which child gets ignored and which one is the boss of the house, which one is the spawn of hoarders and which one was born three months too early.

I see the surface. De Botton sees all the layers underneath.

At Heathrow, he employs his omniscient eye when he watches the first planes of the day touch down at 5:30 a.m. London is still sleepy-eyed, but the planes are packed with people whose day is already well-advanced.

“With the aggressive whistling of their engines,” the planes “appeared to be rebuking this domestic English morning for its somnolence, like a delivery person unable to resist pressing a little too insistently and vengefully on the doorbell of a still-slumbering household.”

He sees a family in the check-in line, eager to board the plane to Athens. “It would be difficult to overestimate how much time David had spent thinking about his holiday since he had first booked it the previous January. He had checked the weather reports online every day. He had placed the link to the Dimitra Residence in his Favourites folder and regularly navigated to it. . . . He had pictured himself laying with the children in the palm-lined garden and eating grilled fish and olives with Louise on the terrace.

“But . . . there were still many things that managed to surprise him at Terminal 5.”

From the shoe-shine man to the airport priest (guess what question people ask him the most) to the airline CEO, de Botton’s boundless curiosity makes airports fun again.

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In honor of all the layers de Botton peels back in his slim little book, dig your fork down through the tasty tiers of Chocolate Berry Angel Torte. All this goodness —

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for not many calories. That’s angel food cake for you.

I had a lot of raspberry sauce leftover. Any suggestions on how to use it?