Five down, one to go. London

With sleep snatching away the hours dawn soon came - we were over Greece. Soon the English Channel was underfoot and the patchwork of Kent gave way to the first truly indisputable landmark: the Millennium Dome. Not so useless after all.

A few circuits later we touched down. Six in the morning on an overcast Heathrow day. After twenty years away I was back. After twenty years of increasingly persuasive and frequent dreams, here I was, feeling as if I were dreaming.

But it was a poor dream. Heathrow, as the world's busiest commercial airport was a disgrace. If it was finished it was broken, or closed or just awful. Not dirty per se but the sort of squalor that no number of strange-tongued low-paid immigrants could brush up. The walk from Terminal 3 to 2 had me half expecting to be mugged.

When I got to Terminal 2 I was mugged - ten quid for a shower (if I walked to Terminal 1), five quid for left luggage, one quid for ten minutes on the internet! I told the information lady I'd rather smell thanks, held onto my luggage and spent four quid on the net.

Tarom, the Romanian airline, were checking people in three hours before the flight, so I went into the squalid hole that was Terminal 2 check in and got rid of the bigger of my bags. Once through security I was mugged again, or would have been if I wasn't so tight. Dixons, the electronics retailing chain, offered "Duty Free" prices that were just 10% below what even they said were the high street prices. With VAT at 17.5% it was the archetypal 'Duty Free' rip-off.

At 10.30 in the morning I declined a snifter of whisky in the Whiskies Galore shop but chatted with the Kenyan Indian lady in charge. She showed me a NZ whisky - Milford - I'd never seen in NZ. Mind you I hadn't seen 95% of the other whiskies either.

"I'm tired," I said in Swahili before bidding her "Asante sana" and heading through the ghetto to the gate.