ever since the disastrous opening (for reasons that never made any sense to me, British Airways – which has exclusive use of T5 - was forced to transfer the bulk of its operations to T5 “big bang” instead of slowly transferring over a couple of services at a time. Result – chaos).

That was a few months ago, and things seemed to have been ironed out now. I thought that it was a beautiful structure – full of light and glass. Sometimes a little bit too clever, like the lifts that take you from the Heathrow Express platform into the departure and arrivals areas of the terminal building. There are no buttons to press – the lifts will automatically stop at every floor but even though there are signs and announcements to tell people that, I instinctively pushed what looked like buttons anyway and discovered that they were just name plaques.

The terminal was buzzing with people getting away for the weekend, but it only took 20 minutes to get through security (it would have taken less time if the 3 people in front of me hadn’t set off the metal detector when they walked through!). I thought that was pretty good going.