I very rarely fly anywhere these days – maybe two or three times a year, and often not for ten months or more. I lost track years ago of what amount or density of liquid I’m allowed to have in what form of container, and whether a toothbrush is deemed an offensive weapon. I can’t be bothered to remember what size my hand-baggage is meant to be, and I turn up at check-in without having given any thought to what anything weighs. In fact without my wife to sort through all this crap, it would be a major operation getting me onto any plane, because there are at least five rules I break every time simply by pitching up.

Flying from Bergerac was something that until five years ago involved checking in, waving a passport at a half-asleep douanier, and walking up a flight of stairs to a seat on the plane. In 2010 the process has been modernised to embrace irradiation at regular intervals, daft questions, threatening announcements, and Boarding Areas – the 21^st century spin for Waiting Rooms. But myself, I prefer to think of them as Learning Areas – where with luck one could gain a degree in Boarding Areas (a BA, perhaps) via the study of exhibitions, vending machines, lavatories, used newspapers and tannoy announcements.

In the Boarding Area at Bergerac is an exhibition featuring pictures of aeroplanes being shot down, complete with vivid accounts of World War I pilots being burned to a crisp or reduced to pocket concertinas owing to the lack of parachutes. As there is far more waiting than boarding, reading material is a good idea; just not this particular reading material. The other things provided in the boarding area are vending machines.

I’ve often wondered about the strategy behind the filling of vending machines: why the only crisp variant is spaghetti bolognaise, all bottled water is kiwi-fruit-flavoured, and the Mars Bars have NEW fondant or horse-radish centres. The best hypothesis I’ve come up with over the years is that in food marketing companies the world over, the vending machines are little more than receptacles for failed new product development projects. Thus that ready-to-eat Vesta pineapple curry bar is relegated to Athens Airport’s machines after one short and disastrous test market in a sub-region of Tyne Tees.

The other thing plainly apparent in all airports today is the dead hand of the accountant who can’t see beyond the next quarterly results. The loo-paper, for instance, would be good as the raw material for bus tickets, but is about as hygienic as using your hand. The Indian bloke cleaning the loos at Manchester told me that thanks to this brainwave, people use five times as much and so the loos get blocked all the time. There must be some use for accountants beyond winter fuel, but I’m blowed if I know of one.

In the loo was yet another vending machine, this one promising BETTA SEX THAN EVVA! Shame for Evva is all I can say, but I’d wager that with or without the sheath on sale therein, nobody’s getting better sex than England footie love-rat Peter Crouch, who has got Abbey worried by bedding a string of other girls. In the light of this development, Abbey has taken two weeks off to sort er ead art. It could be worse for Abbey: she could be with bed-hopping sex-addict Ashley Cole, who has been outed by a Twitter-babe pole dancer….or perhaps dating someone who reads Nuts magazine, which this week promised Busty Babes in bed. Busty or not, the Katie Price formally known as the Muslim State of Jordan says she is “great in bed cos I go at it like a fat ugly bird who’s ever so grateful”. It’s amazing what you can learn while waiting for aeroplanes.

One thing I learned is that I’m going increasingly deaf. I heard over the tannoy that it was “the final call for all Iranian passengers on BD flight 1476 to Heathrow”, and wondered why they’d been singled out. Or why indeed flight 1476 wouldn’t feel safer leaving them behind. But it turned out the phrase was “all remaining passengers”. What a fine world it would be if we could tell the harmlessly remaining from the barmy Iranian in air travel.