The Glidd of Glood Blog

Swiss motorcycle pass fiasco

I could almost guess how this would work out when I heard the original idea. The highly entertaining YouTube bike magazine, 44 Teeth, bought a couple of second-hand Italian bikes and decided to find out which was the better by riding them across Europe to the racetrack at Mugello in Italy. On the way, we the viewers would have plenty of laughs as well as finding out something about the two Italian thoroughbreds (©bike magazine clichés) and how they stack up as Europe-crossing steeds, not something they were necessarily designed for, but something that many owners, including myself, want to use them for.

The route was across a dull bit of France (motorway) to the Black Forest in Germany, and thence through the Swiss Alps to northern Italy. And therein lies the rub: the Swiss Alps. A decade ago, this would have seemed a wonderful idea – indeed it would have been pretty stupid and even sacrilegious to have done anything different. Switzerland was the biking mecca, an almost obligatory pilgrimage for anyone who wanted to experience the ultimate biking roads. Motorcycling is all about corners and if you can corner on well-maintained tarmac surrounded by the most stunning scenery, there can be no better two-wheeled experience outside of a racetrack. One of the reasons I ended up living in Switzerland was to have this motorcycling nirvana on my doorstep. Bye-bye the clogged, Gatso-infested roads of the UK with their endless urban sprawl and 30 mph limits and hello the sweeping blacktop of the Grimsel, Furka and Susten passes, to name just the most well-known three of a seemingly endless list of mythical Alpine roads. And I made the most of them. I have done most of the Swiss passes on my bike, and some of them I have done many times. I even once did 12 of them in a single day and had the aching forearms to prove it from braking for hundreds of hairpin bends.

But that was then and this is now. Since those days of fun, the Swiss have passed the Via Sicura laws, their absurd and almost Stalinist take on how to behave on the road. The idea, of course, is to save lives and reduce accidents, but there is also a hidden ecological subtext which implies that simply using a petrol-powered conveyance for fun is in some way reprehensible and antisocial and anyone who gets their fun that way can be treated like a second-class citizen. Via Sicura came into force in 2013 and introduced a whole raft of repressive measures designed to make speeding, not to mention driving under the influence of alcohol, so financially painful that no one would ever do it.

Once you have voted in such laws – and strangely, and for reasons I have still not ascertained, these laws were never submitted to a popular referendum as just about any laws in Switzerland are – you can react in different ways. The normal way is to know that they exist but only enforce them in the case of stupidity or negligence on the part of motorists. This is how traffic laws were enforced for decades. The overriding cause of traffic-relate death occurs in built-up areas where there are many people around whom you might injure or kill if you misbehaved. And who really complains about speed-traps in town? No one that I have ever met. But out of town, where accidents involving injury or death are far rarer, the authorities used to let people get on with it, to use their own judgement, really.

Not anymore. Not only are the fines and sanctions absolutely iniquitous for such benign infringements, but the police do their utmost to use their insidious robotic speed traps absolutely everywhere. It’s a bit like being spied on by the Stasi the moment you get behind the wheel or clamber aboard a motorbike, and then being sentenced to the Gulag for a chance remark.

Try this. There is a long, straight road near me between two villages. It’s about a kilometre long and goes past no buildings. There are fields on either side with perfect visibility. It is in the middle of the countryside. How many accidents occur on this road? I can’t think that there can be any. Your biggest danger would be falling asleep at the wheel. In June, however, on a cloudless summer day, the police installed a speed-trap on this road. They hid their little tripod speed camera under a black net, laid out a long cable and hid their van on the edge of the forest some 75 yards away from the road. The radar was very hard to see as it was almost entirely hidden in the wheat field. As bad luck would have it, I had an errand to run that day. I drove past the camera in one direction and unbeknownst to me, was clocked. Then, 20 minutes later, I drove past it again and was clocked again.

The speed limit in Switzerland on the open road is 80 kph or 50 mph. Compare this to the 100 kph or 60 mph in the UK. As letters in the post later pointed out, I was recorded at 98 kph on the way out and was awarded a CHF 250 fine – about £193. Were I to have done this in the UK, I would still have been driving legally and incurred no fine at all. Then, on the way back, I got caught at 108 kph. They kindly subtracted 6 kph to leave me with a recorded speed of 102 kph. For this offence, I was given a CHF 400 fine and CHF 50 costs. I was also the subject of a criminal enquiry which finally stipulated that the offence was not a severe one and that no further action would be taken. I didn’t lose my licence, even for 3 months (the Swiss minimum). Nonetheless, this little bit of paperwork has engendered another CHF 70 of costs. So in that direction, I got hit with CHF 520 of expenses, about £400. Thus my little excursion to the neighbouring town cost me nigh on £600, for a speed that wouldn’t even have caused UK law enforcement to blink. How guilty do I feel? Not very. I’ve been driving along that road almost daily at similar speeds for about 15 years. That is not a dangerous speed. It’s not even an uncommon one.

Ah, you say, but the proof is in the pudding. No doubt Swiss accident rates are hugely inferior to UK ones. Wrong. They’re not. As this graph shows, all countries in Europe reduced traffic fatalities between 2010 and 2017 without resorting to such ridiculous measures. The UK didn’t make much progress, but then the UK was already about the safest country to drive in. Short of banning vehicles on the roads, you will never reach a zero-fatality accident rate. So it appears that the ludicrous Swiss legislation has simply criminalised the populace, destroyed lives, caused people to lose their jobs and created misery and unfairness in spades. As if the non-car-owning bicycling denizens of Zurich cared.

Back to the unfortunate journalists of 44 Teeth. Having spent a superb day whisking along the bends of the Black Forest road in Germany, they inevitably fell foul of a Swiss Alpine speed trap, cunningly designed to fleece tourists. The result? A CHF 4000 franc fine, payable on the spot and an instant driving ban for doing 140 kph, reduced to 138 kph. Just as well it was: over 140 kph can put you in prison. As I pointed out in my previous Via Sicura post, travelling at 140 kph is not only easy on a modern motorbike, it’s almost obligatory. That is the speed at which they work and the suspension, brakes and motor are easily up to the job. Is 80 kph really that much safer on the open road? Not in my experience. You just lose concentration and start looking at the scenery, of which there is much.

So let’s be honest here for a moment. Most motorcyclists will not even take their bike out of the garage if they really have to ride it at 80 kph. They aren’t designed to travel at these speeds and the experience is no fun. You might as well do something else. And no motorcyclists are going to visit Switzerland if they think that they are going to be entering a lottery whereby they stand to go home CHF 4’000 poorer or worse. The comments to the video are unsurprising. There are currently 1’260 of them and the video has been seen 52’000 times. In 24 hours. If Switzerland wanted to torpedo its tourist industry, they wouldn’t go about it any other way. You might think that no one needs a load of speeding motorcyclists to keep their tourist industry afloat, but visit the Alpine passes in the height of summer and you will find the roads seething with motorcyclists. These same motorcyclists are eating dinner and staying in hotels and buying petrol. A CHF 4000 franc fine says “Fuck off and don’t ever come back!” and most people will read this message loud and clear. Swiss hotels and infrastructure need two-wheeled tourists. God knows that with climate change, the day of skiers filling Alpine hotels are surely numbered. There won’t be any snow soon.

And that’s pretty much the only hope we, the motorcyclists in this country have, namely that money talks. When the bikers have all been driven away, and surely it won’t take too long now, then maybe there will be political pressure for Via Sicura to be scrapped. Via Sicura, the raft of legislation that other countries have done without and still managed to achieve the same results.

Welcome to Didcot

I thought I’d share some recent photos of Didcot with you. Didcot is a railway town in south Oxfordshire and is a few miles away from where I grew up. It was always unutterably naff and it still is. It occupies the 20^_th position in The Idler’s Book of Crap Towns, a ranking, lest it be forgotten, that was democratically voted on.

I sometimes wonder if Didcot isn’t the reason I emigrated. It must at least be a contributory factor. Every day of my secondary school career, I would be in Didcot in the morning and the afternoon because that is where the school bus went from or ended up. I tend to tell people that I grew up near Didcot because it’s a place they recognise, being on the mainline from London Paddington to Bristol or Wales. No one ever tells me how fortunate I was. Let’s be fair for a moment. Didcot is nowhere near as bad as countless deprived areas of the UK. It would be unlikely to make you suicidal and being small with a very good connection to London, it’s thankfully easy to leave. It hasn’t suffered the collapse of some vital industry.

But in some respects, that is all the more damning. Didcot lies in a fairly affluent area of the country, surrounded by more or less expensive villages. It is within easy commuting distance of London. Strangely, none of that affluence seems to have rubbed off on the town. There has been much development of part of it. There is now a large Tescos on the outskirts (so that you don’t actually have to visit the place to do your shopping). Or you could visit the large Sainsbury’s in the centre of town. This will enable you to park in the gigantic car park that takes up much of central Didcot and you can visit the shopping precinct with its gamut of pound shops while you are about it. The only nod to the affluence surrounding Didcot appears to be The Body Shop selling its somewhat over-priced toiletries.

Maybe it is unreasonable to have expected Didcot to morph into a pleasant town in the three and a half decades since I left the area, but I entertained a vague hope. All that has happened in the interim is that it has become more convenient to buy groceries in. In this respect, it seems to be a microcosm of the UK.

The railway station has been redeveloped for some unknown reason. It isn’t any bigger or nicer than it was, just stripped of whatever Victorian charm it may possibly have once possessed. The power station is now half its previous size. And that, pretty much, is the sum of Didcot’s progress. No one, it appears, has had a vision for Didcot or any desire to improve it and so it remains just a convenient stop on a railway line.

This, like the photo at the top of the page, is in Didcot's Lower Broadway, the central street running through the town. You might have expected something a little more, what? Grandiose?

 

This is what now lies between the Broadway in the centre of town and the station at the bottom. A large and convenient carpark and a couple of warehouse-like shops. This is what planners have wanted for Didcot - convenient shopping for all those people who don't live there. You have to admire their aspiration.

Oh, look! A nice new betting shop. Class.

And this tasty pile of weeds just down from the betting shop used to be the Didcot Casuals football ground. Probably just about sums up the feelings of the populace towards their football team. Amazingly, Didcot featured in some League or FA Cup latter round recently, at least a round latter enough that I noticed they were playing. I'd have gone had I been in the country, if even ironically. Opposite the weeds are these houses which used to be for railway workers. They did look poor, but now they look almost quaint:

Architecture, Didcot-style. This little block has barely changed since the 60s. The large shop in the centre used to be the toy shop - a major attraction when I was a kid. The slightly later edition bunker on the right used to be my bank, I think. It was always horrible and it doesn't look any better now.

Lest you think I have gone out of my way to snap some of the less edifying bits of Didcot, you'd be wrong. This is pretty much what it's like. Yes, there is a very small village-y bit which you never visit, but it's hardly typical of the place. These photos of downtown Didcot sadly are.

There was a time when I swapped postcards with a friend of places we had been. The idea was to find the most hideous postcard and send that. You got additional points if the place you had visited was genuinely nice, but the postcard was foul.
I think I still have somewhere a copy of postcard I sent of Auch in south-west France. Auch is a very pretty town, but I managed to find a postcard of the council estate.

I also remember stumbling upon a treasure-trove of black and white postcards of Didcot outside a newsagents in the Broadway. They must have been sitting in the rack in the sun for decades, as the cars in the photos were well out of date. They were also curling up at the edges with age.

I seriously considered making a calendar of photos of Didcot and sending it to my brother in Australia as a Christmas present. I only discarded the idea (perhaps temporarily...) because I don't have enough photos. I'd also need some in the rain or fog.

As a final note, I should mention the Didcot Railway Museum. This museum is by far the best, and perhaps only, reason you would want to visit Didcot. It is excellent with much rolling stock, refurbished old carriages, locomotives in various stages of restoration and all sorts of artefacts from the age of steam. On some weekends they get a couple of locomotives out to chuff-chuff along a short section of track. It's not expensive to visit and it really does make a great day out. The railway museum, not surprisingly, is located just next to the train station. This means that it is possible to arrive by train, visit the museum and then leave without ever setting foot in Didcot proper. I suspect that this is the best way to organise your visit.

 

 

 

 

Jihadists say - no jam tomorrow

With many fruit trees and bushes, I make quite a lot of jam.

I make jam out of cherries, wild cherries, morello cherries, quince, pears, damsons, redcurrants, blackcurrants, blackberries and probably some other things.

It’s not that I’m a great fan of jam, but when you have all the fruit, you either let it rot, which seems pretty stupid, or you turn it into jam for the price of a bag of sugar or two.

Jam makes great presents, because most people have some sort of a use for it and many of them don’t have any access to fruit trees and bushes, so they end up having to buy it. They are only too happy to have homemade stuff given to them; after all, it tastes better and doesn’t contain anything except fruit and sugar, and the fruit trees aren’t sprayed with pesticides.

But the people who most appreciate my homemade jam are my British friends who would be recipients of various jars when I went to visit them. Well, it’s nice to bring some sort of token present to say that you appreciate their hospitality.

That was all very well until some time last year. Some time in 2013, Swiss decided to become like every other airline and increase the price of your plane ticket if you wanted to check a bag. I am sure they have good economic reasons for doing this, and I’m not going to lambast them as you can still fly cheaply from Geneva to London – just so long as you only have carry-on luggage.

But as you will know, you can’t take liquids, pastes and gels with you in your hand luggage, ever since 2006 when some bearded extremist fools tried to blow up a transatlantic plane in a foiled plot. This means that if I want to give away some pots of jam to my British friends, I have to buy a much more expensive plane ticket so that I can check my jam in the hold. In other words, it costs about £50 to bring over a couple of pots of jam – which is patently absurd. And for the same reason, British friends who visit me in Switzerland can’t take any back with them.

As we focus on beheadings and Islamist murders, tortures and exactions, we might perhaps miss the way the jihadists have succeeded in poisoning small facets of our everyday lives which you don’t have to go to Syria to suffer. Bearded idiots with a medieval outlook and some strange belief in a murderous sky-god are thus depriving my friends of small tokens of my esteem. This is the insidious way in which these people have made everyone’s lives just a little bit worse. While we are about it, we might also blame the IRA for the way that you can’t find a litter bin in London. Try buying a muffin at a London terminus and then see if you can find anywhere to throw away the wrapper. Not a litter bin in sight. Why? Because at some time, they made convenient places to put bombs. Of course, if the IRA weren’t going to use them to murder innocent travellers, you can bet that the jihadist idiots would have adopted them instead.

So whilst you have very little chance, statistically, of being murdered by terrorists in Western Europe, you still have to suffer their futile beliefs in your small, everyday existence. In some ways, that’s their greatest victory. They truly have influenced the lives of millions of people – for the worse.

Fighting cows at the Tortin Inalp - what happens when the skiers have all gone home

 

We're at the bottom of Tortin, the famous black run in Verbier which makes the hearts of the less competent skiers quail. But the snow has all melted, and the tourists have gone home. There are no more Moncler jackets on the slopes, no more Chanel specs and Jet Set suits.

Like fairies at the bottom of the garden that appear when no one is around to see them, the Swiss have come back to reclaim their pastures and the ski slopes take on a whole different complexion. This is the face of the Alps that most of the winter-sporting tourists never see. It is the day of the Inalp, when the mountains take on their other, older visage and revert to providing grazing for cattle. If you dropped something off a chair lift, it is now that some cow will discover it.

 

The Inalp is when the cows are led up from the valleys to their summer home, grazing on the grass and Alpine flowers that appear when the snow has finally receded. But at Tortin in the Valais, these are not just any old cows. They are the fighting cows of the race d'Herens, the black and muscular animals that now seemingly serve no purpose apart from entertaining their often wealthy owners. It is time to have a fete, a party, and in the Valais tradition with a lot of melted cheese and local wine. It's all very traditional: Alpine horns and the sort of music that is never going to be featured on MTV. There is even a bell-strap repairer on hand to make good the damaged leather that inevitably results when the cows get stuck in.

  

The cows are already here and having been let out for a bit of a scuffle in the morning, they are now chilling out in the cowshed, having a lie-down and a chew before coming out for round two in the evening. For it is in the early days of the Inalp that the cows will establish the pecking order that will determine their social hierarchy for the rest of the summer. Cows come from different farms to be lumped together in the Alpine pasture for a few months. In each stable, the cows will already have established their hierarchy. They will have decided this last year for the most part and there is already an understanding as to who is the Queen of the cowshed. But now that they are meeting strange cows from different sheds, the process has to start again on a bigger scale. Who is going to be Queen of the larger herd? That is what everyone is here to find out.

At half past five, the cows are led out of the shed to a roped-off area of the pasture where they get on with the business of roughing each other up. There is a tremendous clonking of huge bells, a lot of pawing of the ground in areas that quickly become dusty pits. Like a school playground, they go around in gangs, with lesser cows from the same herd happy to defend their queen and lend a helping hoof when she is defied by some pretender. Men with stout sticks are on hand, reading the complicated game, to ensure that the fighting doesn't degenerate into gang warfare. Fights have to be on a strictly one-to-one basis. The spectators, like sporting spectators anywhere, add their expert commentary.

 

 

It's easy to spot the toughest beasts. The stable queens have red numbers on their flanks, the others only white numbers. Naturally, a lot of the fights tend to be between rival queens. Quite how the cows keep track of it all, I have no idea, but they do, and after a few days, one of them will become Queen of the pasture - la Reine - and they will all be able to settle down for reasonably trouble-free grazing for the rest of the summer. There will still be spontaneous fights, but they are sporadic and only witnessed by the cowherds.

There is massive prestige attached to having a Queen, and owning a fighting cow is not a cheap business. I was told that the running costs for a cow are about CHF 9'000 a year - that's over £5'000. The cows seemingly have no real purpose apart from getting involved in a bit of agro. From what I can make out, they aren't milked and they are not generally eaten for meat (although it can be found). There are a lot of breeds available that are more suitable for either purpose. So you have to think of the fighting cows as sort of pets to be cherished and admired. Their whole uselessness is superb in this day and age of economic utility.

Combat de Reines – the incredible Swiss fighting cows

I have spent the afternoon in front of the box – a pretty sad way to spend a Sunday, but it was raining and the TV looked promising. After the fairly uninspiring Barcelona Grand Prix, there was the final of the Swiss Cup (football) which I was going to look at as it as between my local club Lausanne and Basle, but on the other channel was the vastly more interesting Combat des Reines d’Aproz or Fighting Cow Championship. OK, it looks as if you need bringing up to speed.

 

In the Canton of Valais, consisting mainly of the Rhone valley and mountains, there is a breed of cows called the cows of the Val d’Herens. If you look at a map, you will find the Val d’Herens as a valley running north-south parallel with the Val de Bagnes, which contains the famous ski resort of Verbier, and next to the Val d’Anniviers. The cows of the Val d’Herens are black, quite small in cow terms, but extremely muscular. They are also very aggressive – at least with each other. The cows live in the valleys in the winter – normally inside as there is snow on the ground – but are led up into the Alpine pastures in the summer to graze for several months. Transhumance – you no doubt remember it from geography.

 

 

 

The peculiarity with the cows of the Val d’Herens (not that all of them are now to be found there by any means) is that they naturally establish a pecking order (grazing order?) by fighting each other. It’s just what they do. The dominant cow, having fought or intimidated all the others, is known as La Reine – the Queen. This is the cow that will lead the others up to the pasture during the annual Montée à l’alpage, and will lead them down again in the autumn during La Désalpe. As the dominant cow, the others naturally follow her. We are talking cows here, not bulls. God knows how aggressive the bulls are.

 
La Désalpe. Note - these are not fighting cows. Most cows in the Alps aren't.   

 

The cows don’t need the intervention of man to organise some good fights. They naturally lock horns and head-butt each other. But it goes without saying that this is quite a spectacle and man has taken advantage of the cows’ natural inclination to stage cow fights. As you will see from the videos (plenty more of them on YouTube), these take place in an arena in the form of a sort of knock-out competition. The cows each have a number painted on them, and are set against an adversary on the basis of a draw. Winning cows go on to fight another one. Not all the fights are spectacular by any means. Sometimes a cow only has to give another one a dirty look and that is enough for it to secure victory. The cows seem to be highly aware of their chances in a fight and some are more combative than others. But as a breed, the fighting cows of the Val d’Herens are very proud beasts, and don’t easily admit defeat. There aren’t that many of the breed in Switzerland – only a few thousand, as they are somewhat difficult to control and probably don’t provide as much milk as other breeds. These days, they are mainly kept for their fighting abilities.

 

There aren’t many organised fights, and they only happen in the spring and autumn. This is because for the rest of the summer, the cows are up in the mountains, and the winter isn’t a very propitious time for organising fights as the cows are inside, not getting any exercise, and no one wants to freeze to death outside watching them.

 

 

 

Today was the cantonal final, with the cows fighting to be La Reine des Reines – the Queen of Queens. Amazingly, there is no betting – no book on the outcome of the fights. I find this incredible. In any other country, the betting would be the major interest. But Swiss betting laws don’t permit it. I have always suspected that there are illegal books on the outcomes, but now I am not so sure. This is because to be the owner of the winning cow, or any cow that does well, is such an honour that the sport doesn’t need betting in order for it to arouse the deepest passions. There are four different categories, three based on weight and one for young cows that have only had one calf. The cows may not be so big as a breed, but naturally the best fighters tend to be bigger. The categories vary from around 600kg to 850kgs. That’s the better part of a tonne.

 

Today’s final was fascinating. One of the fights ended in a draw after about 30 minutes of intense struggle, when the owners decided that their cows had had enough and deserved to call it quits. But the final pitted last year’s champion, Manhathan (sic) against the young and inexperienced Altesse. Manhathan is a monster of 850kgs, who hasn’t lost for 2 years. Altesse – not what you would call a small cow at 750kgs – and only about 3 years old, seemingly had no chance. This was to discount her incredible spirit and pride. The fight lasted 40 minutes – almost a record – and was so long, that there was much discussion about whether it should be called a draw and the beasts tied up. But a school of thought decided that it should reach its logical conclusion – after all, it couldn’t last indefinitely. Finally the youth of Altesse won out and the seemingly indomitable Manhathan caved in. It was worthy of the most moving moments in sport.

 

The Swiss have other strange and traditional mountain competitions, like flag-throwing and wrestling, involving throwing your adversary by getting hold of his shorts. But the cow fighting is the most spectacular and interesting and only happens in the Valais. I am surprised it hasn’t become a major tourist attraction. If you’ve never been to Switzerland, I advise you organising a spring or autumn trip to see it - clouds of volcanic ash permitting.

A Day at the Airports

Monday I was meant to be flying from Switzerland to London and on to Aberdeen to pick up a car to drive to Royal Lochnagar distillery which is next to Balmoral. Well, that was the plan.

I caught the plane out of Geneva OK at 11:45, and we had been going for a half hour or so when the pilot said he had some bad news: a computer malfunction, which meant that we would have to turn around and go back to Geneva.

When a pilot says he has some bad news, there is a lot worse news he can give you than this, such as "I can't control this thing - aaaargh!" or "Oh well, there goes the final engine!" So in the general scheme of things, I suppose I can be quite happy that a computer malfunction was all that there was. He said he was going to have to land the plane manually - well, you would hope that that was within his powers, after all, he is a pilot. I wasn't overly concerned. Indeed, I thought how exciting for him, to actually have to do something, instead of having a computer do everything whilst he read the paper. I think we had to turn back because the runway at London City is very short; they can't afford to screw up, or you drop into the Thames. I am glad that London City has my best interests at heart and doesn’t trust pilots without a computer.

You might have thought that we could continue on to Heathrow instead, or somewhere with a similarly massive runway, where even apprentice pilots would stand a fair chance of getting the plane down on the concrete bit without mishap. But it is the nature of Heathrow these days that the place is bursting at the seams and is in continual turmoil, so I imagine it was never really an option to add to the traffic circling over London and rendering normal conversation in the streets impossible.

Thus back we went. Then they booked me on another flight to Heathrow, via Zurich. I knew I had missed my 3:30 flight connection to Aberdeen, but got myself booked on the 6:15. Unsurprisingly, though, the Zurich - Heathrow flight took off 40 mins late, meaning that this connection was now severely compromised. I might have still got it but then there was a balls up with the luggage at Heathrow. My first bag was the first one off - hurray! - leaving me waiting for the 2nd one. Which failed to turn up. There were a few other people in the same boat. When it was apparent that nothing more was going to arrive, and with only about 45 mins on the clock to get from Terminal 2 to the brand new, all-singing, all-dancing, just-opened Terminal 5 (which doesn't work), even if I could find any luggage, I turned with the other unfortunates to the baggage handlers. Suddenly some lady beckoned us over and there on a trolley were our bags - all marked "priority". Fabulous.

Picked up bags, dashed out, jumped in cab, got stung for £12 just to change terminals, arrived at T5, but of course had missed flight. So then I had to be put on Standby (which has been rechristened "Flight Management" - ha!)  for another one hour wait for the 8pm flight. Why are we continually in thrall to a pile of corporate pseuds who feel it necessary to rename “standby” which we all understand, with “flight management” which means nothing? Not only does it mean nothing to me, but if I were Japanese, it might mean even less. I can’t help feeling that not long will go by before a poor Japanese person with limited command of English will wish to be put on Standby and will have no idea where to go. For your information, it is appropriately located at desk A13.

But, oh joy, I was to be admitted to the holy of holies, the 8:15 flight to Aberdeen and trundled off to wait in the lounge. Until 9:30. Why the delay? Because it was apparently impossible to locate a “turnaround manager”. Naturally, I would have given up and gone home hours ago if I had known, but I couldn’t, and BA had my bag, so there was nothing for it but to sit and wait gormlessly.

Just when I had gone to ask the Lounge staff once more if the flight was really going to take off, they called it. Marvellous. And after some potato salad, a cold lump of smoked mackerel and a beer, I arrived at Aberdeen and went to collect my luggage. Not. For there was no bag. Was I worried? I was almost pleased and smugly vindicated. For you see, I KNEW in advance that they would lose my luggage. Their record for luggage loss is unsurpassed. It is as if the stuff just zings out of their hands into space, they have no way of keeping hold of it. I actually heard from reliable sources that they still have 15’000 unclaimed bags that they don’t know what to do with from their last baggage fiasco last summer. Yup, BA are the masters of the orphaned bag. They could open a Battersea Bag Home.

Now here is the clever bit: I had packed all the things I needed for my 24 hours in Scotland into my hand luggage, and the missing bag only contained non-essential items (well, non essential for the first day in the UK). So I bid Aberdeen adieu, confident that I had at least a fighting chance of seeing my bag next evening back at the airport, and hopped into my automatic Vectra for the 75 minute dark drive to Ballater.

And after dodging suicidal rabbits on twisty roads, I arrived at 1am. Another fab day of post-modern travel. Still, I bet there were all sorts of people who had worse days in Dafur, or Afghanistan, or Zimbabwe. Can’t complain, eh? And far be it from me to adopt the facile Terminal 5 bashing that has appeared in the press ever since it opened. Teething problems, nothing more. At least it looks like the sort of airport that we can own up to some time in the future, along with just about every other European airport. I mean compared to what we know – Gatwick – a joke which was already funny when it appeared on Dr Who in the 60s, Stansted – a cattle shed in East Anglia, the rest of Heathrow – worn out carpets of dubious taste and incomprehensible intercoms – it looks like a pretty modern, tasteful airport. You can even charge up your mobile phone in the light and airy Caffè Nero. So let’s give them a chance. One day it may even work. Probably will. Just don’t let your bags out of your sight.