Alexander Chancellor Why can’t we have more public toilets and fewer wheelie-bins?

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. And as if all that were not enough, I awoke next morning to a discussion on the Today programme about a worrying decline in the number of public conveniences. Toilets, or fear of their unavailability, have always been a British obsession, as the late Auberon Waugh used to point out regularly in these pages; and it was one of John Major’s promises as prime minister to ensure a better supply of them. But somehow this never happened and, according to a trade union official complaining on Today about the difficulties caused by their shortage to outdoor workers such as lollipop ladies, it is all the fault of government cuts to local authority budgets.