The second leg of our return flight on Monday (31 March), from Heathrow T5 to Manchester, was cancelled by BA as I had feared. It wasn’t so bad. I rang BA bookings from Barcelona and they put us on a later flight from T5, and also moved us to a later flight from Barcelona so we ended up with more shopping time. Not sure if that’s good or bad.

We risked checking our suitcase through to Manchester and it duly appeared. It seems that BA had decided to draw a line under the luggage mountain, which had grown to 28,000 items, parceling it off as a bad job and delivering a “normal service” to new passengers. Agreed. Better than throwing more bags on the pile and extending the misery to yet more people.

So we actually just missed the real chaos both on the way out and on the way back. Perfect timing or what?

It wasn’t till we were having dinner in Barcelona with an old friend that we had any inkling of the chaos that ensued (and continues to manifest itself) after we left the country.

We’re now worried about whether our flight back from Heathrow to Manchester on Monday might be cancelled!

Looking back on the events of Thursday morning, we got away very lightly indeed.