…only to find myself still having to claw, scratch and pull hair to get on board. There was NO WAY I was missing that bus.

As it was, the trip was quite soothing at first and I couldn’t quite put my finger on why, until at last it hit me - for the first time in four months I was back on the proper side of the road, actually able to understand the road signs flying past us.

That’s ‘flying’ in a loose sense of the term - just outside Heathrow we hit traffic. That is to say, no-one else on the road hit traffic, but we sure did. Every lane the bus driver merged into would abruptly stop, while all the other lanes would start flying past at breakneck speed. After traversing about 2 miles in the space of 2 hours, we pulled into Stansted just in time…to watch the connecting bus to Bath just pulling out of the station.

I think it was sometime between eating my soggy cheese sandwich in the biting wind and waiting in the pouring rain at midnight for my third missed connection of the day that it suddenly dawned on me why people refer to this country as cold, wet and dreary. It’s because it’s cold, wet and dreary.