The queue is as quintessentially British as fish and chips, a Sunday roast or a post-pub kebab. I’m all for it. It appeals to my first-come-first-served sense of fair play. Every-man-for-himself is where anarchy reigns and the Devil thrives. And, for those of us in cattle class, queuing is an indispensable part of modern-day mass tourism. Corralling the great unwashed makes for a brutal experience at the best of times. It’s the price we pay for a fortnight in faraway places.
We’ve just landed back from a restful and life-affirming two-centre tour of the Greek Ionian Islands – Paxos and Corfu. More of this to come. Remarkably, our connections – taxis, outbound flight, ferries and transfers – went without a hitch. That is until we hit the greatest hitch of them all – the global IT meltdown. Picture it, Corfu Airport: rising temperatures, queues going nowhere, tetchy toddlers, blank screens and blank faces on (understandably) clueless staff and stoic Brits mumbling ‘organised chaos’. It makes you proud.
What to do when ‘computer says no’? Go back to pen and paper, of course. Our suitcase disappeared down the conveyor belt with a hand-written tag. That’s the last we’ll see of that, we thought.
But actually, it worked out ok in the end. We arrived back at Norwich International Airstrip only 90 minutes late – as did our luggage. Well done to all the staff at Corfu Airport who kept their heads. And special thanks to the better half of our local innkeeper who hung about to pick up two wilting pansies and deposit them back home.
