What on earth is going on? Has the world gone completely mad? It's almost a rhetorical question now. Feels like one thing after another. Do you get that? Anyway, more of that in a minute. First, welcome one and all. If you're here, you must be a good person. I tell myself. It's good to have you. So before I launch it into what I like to call my monologue, here's a quick message about how you can support this channel.

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Over the weekend, I travelled by plane, aeroplane, from Edinburgh, which is my nearest airport, to the Channel Island of Guernsey.

I passed through three airports coming and going.

I say it's impossible now to miss the dystopian nature of air travel.

It seems to me that for decades now, airports have been being modified

and the personnel involved, trained or retrained in different techniques and approaches.

So that the passenger is made to feel entirely at the mercy of the system.

It crept up on us.

It's a bit like that thing about, you know, raising the temperature under a pan of water with a frog in it,

you know, in the hopes that the frog won't notice. But when it comes to airports and aircraft

and air travel, it wasn't always this way. I'm old enough to remember when air travel was,

or was certainly pushed as glamorous, a glamorous world of being spoiled.

Advertising and, I don't know, public relations in the business in general, presented the idea that to fly was, in the words of the pilot poet John McGee, to slip the surly bonds of earth and dance

the skies on laughter silvered wings. Poor young John McGee died not long after penning his poem.

He was a spitfire pilot, as it happens. His poem was called High Flight. But by now, air travel, as it is

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