It started on the Gatwick Express, a perfectly ordinary, not particularly comfortable train which you have to pay extra for the privilege of riding. Before we started, they announced over the PA the ticket restrictions in the usual uncompromising (read unfriendly) fashion. Then they didn't turn the PA off, and we were treated to fice monutes of alternating feedback howl and chat among the ticket inspectors. Then the train stopped in the middle of nowhere for several minutes.
At Gatwick we were, of course, at the south terminal and I needed to get to the north. There were signs, somewhat confusing, to the transit system. Apparently it is impossible to go any other way. And the transit was running a reduced service because of maintenance. And I just missed one ...
Check-in was one of the worst experiences I went through. It involved first a very slow-moving queue, about one person per minute. Then an interview with a security officer asking the standard questions. I was directed to a booth wehere the security officer was just going off duty. I didn't have the nerve to do anything but stand there until they found me another one. I had been given something to take on board, and I hoped in a perverse way that the security man would ask to see it, but sadly he didn't. (It was a paper I am taking from Ro to Chris Rodger.)
Then the X-ray machine, and they wanted to look inside my duffle bag -- not because it was suspicious, just because they interview a random selection. Only then did I get to stand in a queue to check in.
I scoured the terminal for a bank but didn't find one. So I changed some cash into dollars and went through security. Then, would you believe, I was asked to open my duffle bag again? When I finally got through security and immigration into the departure lounge I was picked on by the Passenger Survey person, who said she only stopped one in fifty.
In the lounge I got vitamin C and this notebook (which I proceeded to leave behind at W.H.Smith and had to go back for it). The choice of food was abysmal, so I came through to the gate where I am now.
Up till then it had been a good day. Up at six, Selkirk bannock and sausage bagel for breakfast, walk to the station through a brilliant clear dawn, read the BCC proceedings on the way to work, a very good-natured lecture (they asked me to go over conjugacy classes and over proving groups isomorphic, and I turned in rather good impromptu performances), and then the Handbook of Incidence Geometry had arrived, though I didn'thave time to read any of it. I left it with Leonard, and the journals with Thomas and Dima, while I am away.