Fog? In England? In December? Surely not!

Having lived on this fair isle for all my years of existence I've witnessed quite a lot of fog, snow, rain, wind and hail and I'm confident that all of these things are commonplace in December.

Last week my girlfriend and I were turned away from Heathrow when our flight to Munich was among the hundreds cancelled due to the weather. The cancellation of the flight was completely understandable given the conditions - the visibility was so bad that flying would surely not have been safe.

What was amazing to me was the fact that nobody at Heathrow seemed to be in any way prepared for the prospect of bad weather at this time of year. We arrived on Wednesday to a terminal packed so full of people that as soon as we entered we were unable to move and were soon turned away and told to call the airline from home.

There were no staff explaining what was going on, no announcements and no notices displayed anywhere, nor were there any alternative facilities for getting inside the airport to escape the cold.

On Thursday (Day 4 of the bad weather) we returned to discover that a long, narrow, unheated tent had been erected outside the entrance to the terminal. Once again, however, there was nobody telling people where to go, no signs displaying information and no obvious system for processing the vast numbers of people who were unable to fly.

If we'd been attempting to fly from a provincial airport in a third world country staffed by part-timers who needed to get back to their goat herds the crap organisation would have been understandable. For the busiest airport in the world to be so utterly incapable of handling such mindblowing twists of fate as inclement British weather in December is a joke.

Having said all that, we had a lovely time and Munich is an amazing city. Just don't try and get there from Heathrow if the sun isn't shining.