I am not the world's greatest traveller. I hate doing it. I usually enjoy being at my destination. I always enjoy my return. But anything to do with air travel is loathsome in my opinion.

The trip to Washington was familiar in this respect. Getting there was tedious but no more.

Getting back was different. Temperatures had dropped significantly. They were seriously sub-zero. So cold in fact that the water for the toilets in my plane froze. But they didn't notice that until we got on board.

So they got us off again. And took the plane for a trip round the airport. They pressurised it. They turned the heating up to maximum. In a little over two hours they defrosted the tanks. They reloaded us.

Then they announced they'd noticed that the water was now on the runway - they'd broken a pipe in the process of defrosting the tanks. As some wit put it - at least having the water on the runway was better than using the water as a runway (the Hudson river being very fresh in everyone's minds). Either way though we were dumped back in the terminal way after midnight.

And so I got home a day late.

The last time I crossed the Atlantic the airline went bust on me. This time the plane was bust. You can see why I love this process, can't you?

And pragmatically, so lacking in joy is air travel that I really cannot see that any of the projections for Heathrow runway 3 make any sense at all, even if the climate change and peak oil consequences are taken into account.

So yes, I'm against it.