What you’re missing now that you don’t read this in print

Liverpool airport is a curiously unreal place in the half-light before dawn on a cold November morning. Out across the Mersey at high tide, raindrops turn the silver to lead, and at the easyJet departures gate people in tracksuit bottoms brush against the occasional tweed and Remembrance Day poppy. Intending stag-weekenders, and the set who have a little place in the Pyrenees, coincide but do not mingle. A young woman is trying to buy rosé wine, and an elderly gent is trying to find a copy of that morning’s Times.

The elderly gent is me, flying to Barcelona for the day for my sister’s 60th birthday lunch, to return that night to Manchester.

And yes, all the morning papers are available and I buy the one I write for; but it would make no difference if the paper had been the Telegraph or any other quality newspaper: my experience would have been the same.