Returning from holiday with a bad case of airport misery

theguardian.com:

I was in a really bad place last weekend. Not mentally – I was in an airport Starbucks slumped against a wall. It wasn’t until we’d sat in the departure hall for many hours, our two small children seeing in midnight as the rooms slowly filled with hundreds of humans and their thousands of iPads before I realised, with a thrill, that I was inside a news story.

It’s a very particular kind of sweet-and-sour excitement, isn’t it, when you look up from your own personal catastrophe and realise you’re part of something bigger? The dullest, most irritating moments of your life are suddenly polished to a high shine and spotlit beautifully. Stories that, from your mouth would have had friends politely smothering yawns after 30 seconds become whole newspaper spreads, with expert quotes, and panoramic pictures, and someone explaining earnestly how they wee-ed in a cup.

I’m not talking major tragedies here, I’m talking your common domestic shitteries that disturb Britain’s plodding peace to the extent that it makes the papers. I’m talking about the times, say, when you turn on the car radio and learn that you’re sitting in a traffic jam “the length of Wales”, or your little town is experiencing the hottest day in 100 years, or you find yourself at the very end of an NHS waiting list for your ear, or you can no longer afford pasta because of something to do with wheat. So it came to be that my family and I, returning from our first holiday in three years, found ourselves among the thousands of Britons stuck at an airport due to “travel chaos” from worker shortages.

We’d had a lovely holiday, though by that point we did have to keep reminding ourselves of the fact. Despite having swum in the sea that very morning, by 1am I was hazy on