AC and I were running very, very late to check in for a flight from Edinburgh to Korea via London Heathrow. If we didn’t flag down a taxi in Leith soon, we would miss it altogether.

At the airport the British Airways staff were hardly helpful when I said that I had lost our boarding passes. They eventually fashioned a couple of elaborate replacements from blue frosted metal and tried to charged us £16 each.

(We thought it best not to admit that we weren’t really heading all the way to Korea, but had just selected this destination online to get the cheapest fares to London.)