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.

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