After a carefree month at my wife’s house in Tuscany — the longest summer holiday I have spent there for maybe 30 years — the return to England this week has proven especially irksome. It is depressing enough to land at any British airport, but Stansted takes the cake. Arriving there after a Ryanair flight from Pisa (in itself a dispiriting experience), I found myself at the end of an enormous queue, so long that its front was indiscernible, and took 40 minutes to reach the desk of an immigration officer. There were literally thousands of people in front of me. Why so many? Why is England so much more crowded than anywhere else, even than countries with as dense or denser populations? Why has austerity not yielded at least the benefits of smaller crowds at airports and fewer cars on the roads?
Back home, there was not only a month’s worth of mail, mainly bills, to attend to, but also the usual litany of things gone wrong after so long an absence — light bulbs dead, printer not working, chickens missing, and so on.
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