Jeremy Clarke Jeremy Clarke

How I love England — despite the hellhole that is Gatwick airport

The passport checking hall resembled a Nuremberg rally but most of us used it as an exercise in British stoicism

The heart sinks: passport control at Gatwick airport [Greg Balfour Evans/Alamy] 
issue 28 August 2021

At Gatwick airport, after an hour and 15 minutes in a snaking queue system apparently purposely designed to infect as many as possible with Covid-19, and our three bladders inflated like party balloons, we finally presented ourselves before an available passport control officer.

Early fifties, hatless, bald and recruited from the working class, he was the first English person on English soil I’d spoken to for 18 months. I formed the impression of a man who liked a drink. ‘And these two are?’ he said. ‘My grandsons,’ I said, looking at them besottedly in spite of us having lived together in insupportable heat for a week. ‘And you’ve come from where?’ he said. A trick question, surely, the answer to which I had to ponder for a second or two. ‘Nice,’ I said.

Nice airport had been a trial. In the departure lounge Grandad had noticed that he had suffered another brain failure while filling out the boarding pass details.

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