Terminal 5

I did my first flight from the new Terminal 5 last week. For those of you. who have spent the last few weeks in Outer Mongolia, this is the new terminal at Heathrow, which cost enormous amounts of money and opened with a series of glitches, delayed flights and lost luggage.

Being an experienced traveller, I assume that planes will be delayed, luggage will go missing etc. and treat it as a bonus when things actually go right! However, T5 has been a bit beyond that so I took hand luggage only on this trip. The Terminal itself is frankly a terminal, or to put it accurately a shopping mall with planes attached. The surprise was that it was actually two buildings joined by a little transit train, which means it takes ages to get to your gate - be warned. Being positive, security was amazingly fast and I was through in two minutes, which must be a record and the lounge was very comfortable.

The classic cock-up came on the return journey. As an aside, I detest compact digital cameras with just a screen on the back and no viewfinder. I cannot see any joy in trying to compose a picture by staring at a screen, which you can't see in daylight - seems a fundamental design flaw to me. Well, some brilliant spark has done exactly the same on the payment machines for the car park - you insert your ticket and are then presented with a screen, which appears to have black text on a dark grey background - DUUUUUH! In fact, every time a car drives out, someone comes out to help! Now there's a brilliant use of technology.