No one at Heathrow Terminal 5 seems the slightest bit surprised to see a man sitting at a desk in the middle of the departure hall writing his observations about them. Even as Alain de Botton’s typed words appear on a giant plasma screen behind him, passengers bustle blithely past as if a writer-in-residence at an airport were as normal as overpriced sandwiches or duty-free Toblerone.

The casual acceptance of de Botton, whose meditations on love and the work of Marcel Proust have achieved wide literary acclaim, belies a deeply wacky project to create a book of observations that will have a print run of 10,000.

The finished product will be handed out free to passengers who pass through the vast glass-and-steel terminal, which opened last year to scenes of chaos as the baggage system failed.

BAA, the airport operator, is hoping that there will be no more embarrassments during de Botton’s week at the airport. The company has no higher ambition than generating some free publicity, but de Botton has no intention of writing a book to please his paymasters. “We have devised the cockroach test,” he says. “If I see a cockroach coming out of Gordon Ramsay [the restaurant] then I’m allowed to write about it. No lawyers are allowed to vet it.”

British Airways staff have already visited him to offer gossip on what goes on behind the secure doors.

He also has permission to be escorted behind the scenes to see things for himself. “Airports are incredibly restrictive, but they have agreed to let me go wherever I want. I’ve given them a whole list of unrealistic demands. I said, ‘I want to stand on that black patch on the runway where the planes actually land and the rubber comes off their tyres’, so they are going to take me out there at night when the planes have stopped.”

De Botton, a genial balding man of 39, leapt at the chance to spend a week at Heathrow because of his fascination with the secretive nature of airports. “It is an incredibly paranoid place, because it has to be. If you stand in certain places then a patrol car will come along and you will be arrested. It’s brave of them to have me, but it’s better for them to have a book that tells the truth than a glossy brochure that people will just throw away.”

Being a writer in residence in an airport is like being allowed behind the scenes in a nuclear power station or a morgue, he says. “These are places where you think you know what it’s like, but you don’t really.”

Although the author promises to explore high-minded themes such as the power of technology and the frenzy of the modern workplace, he seems most animated by the chance to observe private moments such as families greeting one another at the arrivals gate.

“If you want to people-watch, no one notices you doing it here. You can sidle up to people and they’re so distracted by their surroundings that they don’t notice. You could take your clothes off and no one would care.”

Poetic licence

— Whether Sarah Wardle’s verse inspired Tottenham Hotspur to victory after they made her poet in residence is debatable, but she will for ever be remembered as the “Writer of White Hart Lane”

— In the past decade resident writers in prisons have been sentenced from Holloway to Cardiff, Brixton and beyond

— The Bluewater Shopping Centre in Kent offers almost anything anyone would wish to buy, but also installed Steve Dearden as writer-in-residence in 2006

— The residency of Fay Weldon, below, at the Savoy had its rewards. In exchange for her words, the fee for her £350-a-night room was waived for her three-month stay in 2002, but she did have to pay her mini-bar bill

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