The everyday blog of Richard Bartle.
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5:56am on Thursday, 23rd October, 2025:
Anecdote
The reason I bought some zloties the other day is because I'm speaking at the Games Industry Conference in Poznań on Saturday. My flight is this morning at 7:40, so I had to be at the airport by 5:40. This entailed getting up at 3am and taking a circuitous route to avoid overnight roadworks.
Not only was I driving, but so was the rain. It wasn't a pleasant experience. I followed the satnav directions to the postocde it assured me was Terminal Car Park 1. It was no such thing. It was a dead end single carriageway in an industrial site. I had to do a 7-point turn on a narrow road then drive off looking for signs. I eventually saw one for the medium-term car park, so followed that. After a while, the signage added the short-term car parks, which took me to what would have been Terminal Car Park 1 had the road not been closed off after the car park burned down a few years ago. I continued to Terminal Car Park 2, then saw a P1 painted on the road and followed that. It took me to the part of Terminal Car Park 2 that's now designated Terminal Car Park 1.
Luton is my least-favourite London airport. The security checks have trays you put your stuff in, but they work like a stack. They come in on a conveyor belt, but if you're the closest to the body scanner you won't get a tray until everyone upstream has one. If the person four slots up gets a tray and fills it, they'll get a second tray before you get your first. Fate put me nearest to the body scanner. I eventually got my trays by whisking them off the conveyor belt before they stopped and before the security officer could stop me.
I then had to wait an age for them to come through the X-ray machine, because trays are only pushed onto the scanner's conveyor belt when there's a gap, whch means everyone upstream gets their bags through before you do — including people who arrived much later than you did.
As is common for London airports, there's not enough seating. I only got the spot I'm typing this from because it's beneath a fierce air-conditioning fan that's probably going to give me COVID-19.
Only another hour to go and they'll tell me which gate my flight departs from. I bet they know which it will be already.
Maybe I should stop arriving at airports stupidly early.
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Copyright © 2025 Richard Bartle (richard@mud.co.uk).