Bordeaux; Friday, 18 July, 2014

Originally the flight I’d booked had been just before midday, so I’d taken a day’s leave. Then, a few weeks out BA decided to move the flight by nine hours, and so I found myself with an entire day to kill (as I wasn’t about to lose the leave), but a very relaxed journey to the airport.

Despite getting the slow train, and it going even slower because of signal problems at Redhill, I still arrived at Gatwick nearly three hours before departure.

After a very long wait in the airport the flight was called and we all merrily trooped down to gate 572, where the plane was already waiting, and about 10 minutes later they started to board us.

It was only whilst in my seat looking out of the window I realised that we might be in for a bit of a delay as they were still off-loading the luggage from the inbound flight. Given it had landed at least 40 minutes beforehand it would go to explain why luggage takes so long to get round at Gatwick.

Whilst we sat on the tarmac waiting for the luggage to come off, our luggage to come on, and then the catering to arrive, the fine sunny afternoon started to change, and by the time we were pushing back lightning was flashing around the sky surrounding Gatwick.

The initial take-off wasn’t too bad, but pretty soon we were into some very heavy turbulence as we had no option but to come round the edge of the thunder storm. It was a good half hour before the captain was finally able to turn off the seatbelt signs.

And it was a repeat on the way down, if anything more spectacular storms were raging around Bordeaux as we approached, so it was a very unpleasant approach and landing.

Finally, close to 11:30 at night more than 10 hours later than originally planned, I found myself at the bus stop for the airport bus to the hotel, waiting under a shelter as a torrential downpour, accompanied by lightning in all directions, continued.

Thankfully, the storm started to die down and by the time I reached the hotel, a little after midnight it was just the odd drop of water falling from the sky.

Having checked in I headed straight for bed.