I arrived into Heathrow from Bangkok around 8:30 to discover that, entirely predictably, my flight to Dublin had been delayed until 11. In keeping with the general policy of refusing to tell you anything you might need to know, the gate announcement was set for 10:20. I settled down for a quiet pint, weathering the manifest displeasure of the bar staff who evidently had better places to be on a Friday night. But then, so did I. Eventually the bar closed, leaving me with nothing to do but sit and watch the minutes tick away on the departures screen. A handful of other passengers joined me. At 10:30 the gate still hadn’t been called but I knew it had to be one of the ten gates that all flights to Ireland leave from so I decided to start walking that way.
Only to find that the doors to the gates were locked, with no sign of life visible through the glass. After ten minutes’ increasingly agitated searching (i.e. at 10:45, fifteen minutes to departure) we managed to find a lone security person lurking in a darkened office.
“The people who do the biometrics finish up at ten so we close the gates then.” she explained. “We made an announcement that all passengers on domestic flights should go to their gates at the time.”
“Ireland is NOT domestic!” we shot back, with varying degrees of nationalistic fervour.
“We consider it to be domestic.” she replied.
