31st July:

The advent of satellite navigation systems was a wonderful thing, especially for those weary business travellers who used to have to pick up their hire cars and studiously memorise road maps for 15 minutes before heading out of the underground airport car park and into the bright sunlight of wherever it was they had landed. And promptly get lost at the first roundabout. Now, of course, our humble traveller can leave the car park confident that his final destination has been pre-programmed and a timely arrival is assured. He just has to circle around the first roundabout a dozen or so times until the sat-nav picks up a GPS signal.

If you ever have some time to kill at your nearest airport, it's a fun alternative to plane spotting. Just find yourself a good vantage point near the rental car park and watch a whole procession of sales reps getting whiplash and beeped at. My record is five in one hour.

Travelling anywhere these days by plane is, as every good schoolboy knows, a stressful experience. Heathrow Terminal 4 last week was the very embodiment of stress: long check-in queues, a security queue that went out the front door of the terminal and all the way along the front of building, staff barking instructions at people through megaphones and aggressive BAA employees practically wrenching additional (and apparently unauthorised) pieces of hand-luggage from passengers' hands. It felt like a detention centre. Honestly, veal calves get better treatment. And I was wasn't even travelling Ryanair.

The grand irony here is that a report this week by the International Air Transport Association concludes that the current methods of security screening in the UK do not improve security and seriously inconvenience passengers.

If you can imagine being shouted at by some spotty South African student in a BAA vest as an inconvenience, rather than an objectionable insult.