London City Airport

What is it about airports that turns quite normal people into frantic stress bunnies?

Take the pick up area at Manchester Airport's Terminal 3, it doesn't matter what time of the day or night it is, there will always be people driving like maniacs, cutting between lanes, pulling up on the hard shoulder of the feeder roads and stopping in the middle of the road to drop of passengers.

The other week, when I had gone through to pick up Dave, I actually saw a woman driving through the pick up area with the boot of her people carrier wide open and her husband (I guess) running after the car trying to grab his case out of the back - madness.

At London City Airport yesterday there was a queue to get through the security area and I watched as a grown woman was panicking to get her coat off, her laptop out of her bag and untie her shoes at the same time as her husband. Quite why this had to be co-ordinated I don't know but she was determined that the blue tray with his stuff in should follow her tray through the xray machine. She was getting more and more agitated as other people were putting their trays down and looked ready to stab me in the eye when I put my carry-on bag between their trays to go through the machine (OK I did it deliberately to watch her reaction)

She was muttering away in German, probably putting a curse on me and all my offspring, while her husband, for no obvious reason other than acting like a two year old, gave his tray and extra shove through the machine before stomping off through the metal detector. Then their plans for blue tray efficiency were well and truly scuppered when the alarms went off and he was taken to one side by the security staff. I thought his wife was going to explode, how dare they, her look said, this wasn't part of the plan, she had scheduled 1.5 mins to get through security and now they were going to be 5 mins behind. The fact that they still had well over an hour until their flight was to be called was irrelevant - madness - at airports all common sense seems to fly out with the planes!