What is this, you might ask. Whatever happened to spelling, why the X? Well.

First of all, I'm back in Berlin. That's the unsurprising bit. Second, my luggage is also back in Berlin. That's slightly more surprising. I went to T5 and out of T5, so there was actually no security to go through (woot) and in Aberdeen, they even let me keep my shoes on (huzzah). Now because today is a windy day, and as everyone knows there might be neurotoxins in the wind or something, so either way pretty much every single plane was delayed. I'm not talking about the ones I took, I'm talking about all the ones I saw while idly sitting around.

Let me fast forward a bit, so I can explain the X. I made it to Heathrow, through to the shopping mall-esque waiting areas, found that my flight had been delayed from 18:00 to 18:50 (for a start) and started looking around the place a bit, as opposed to the usual running through that I had to do whenever I was there so far. It really is more of a shopping mall with a few gates attached to them at the ends. Very funky, highly dysfunctional if your A and C gates are just over half an hour apart and gates only get announced half an hour before they close. But no one cares, it's T5, the height of marvellous technology, high life and happy, busy, good looking people!

Fast forwarding again, we now get to the new tricks. The plane was late, so we were even later, everyone boarded, someone kicked up a fuss about having lost their mobile and suddenly we hear the captain. He's sorry that they're late, they came in from Bucarest where there were thunder storms. So we lost our slot. Then we got a new slot, but the bad news is that we also had to give that one up - because we're waiting for the luggage. Not like one or two bags, but actually the whole two containers. Apparently they were put on a cart and the driver of this cart got lost, and worst of all they can't find him. So we have to wait for him, sorry again.

Now that was a first. Not just for me, also for the crew as they stressed, because they really couldn't find the guy with the cart with the containers with the luggage. So we waited. People demanded tea. People were denied tea. People got upset. Eventually, they found the guy and thus the luggage, at which stage we'd missed another slot. I have to say, even by Murphy's standards, that's a pretty nifty trick, kidnapping the guy instead of making the odd suitcase go to Timbuktu. But, this is T5 remember, so it can't just be tricks. It has to be flashy and newtype, so I declare them trix.

Having said all that though, I still have my stuff, which is good because my entire family turned up at the airport. They even brought the dog (I didn't know you could take dogs inside airports). This might have been a side effect of the usual child trafficking that my parents do, but hey. I take what I get. And as I had my stuff, I could shove presents into people's hands and say they'd get the explanations next weekend, when I see them. Mystery!

Now 'tis late and tomorrow will be a long day. While my sister and father had some fast food on the way back, I had a bit of bread and some cherries at home, they never tasted so good (the tastiness of food increases proportionally to your personal level of starvation). And now - hello bed that is big enough for me to do a star fish impression!