Low life | 8 March 2018

Earbuds in. Speed walking to Grant Lazlo’s ‘Heard It Through The Grapevine’. A corridor, a left fork, a moving walkway, a rack of free newspapers — from which I extracted an Evening Standard without stopping — and here, sooner than I’d imagined, was Gate 52. It was a quarter past five in the evening. The Gatwick to Nice easyJet flight was scheduled to take off at 17.40. Looking through the plate-glass windows, I could see that all vestiges of snow had disappeared from the runways, which were dry and lit by evening sunshine.

The cross-country journey to Gatwick last Wednesday had begun at 9 a.m. in a blizzard in Devon. The taxi driver — pressed shirt and tie, Remainer convictions of evangelical proportions — was breezily confident we’d make it through the country lanes to the railway station without a problem, which we did. The train from Plymouth left on the dot and arrived at Paddington half a minute early.