AIRPORT RANT

Health form. Why? Complete waste of time. Has anyone ever filled in one of those forms correctly or completely?

Temperature Check. Why? Does anyone thing that is anything other than a totally cosmetic exercise? Is it really going to stop bird flu or SARS? If you've got either you're not going to be flying in the first place, and if you have boring old ordinary flu or a cold you just take an aspirin to drop your temperature and Bob's your uncle. Scientists can't even agree on what "normal" body temperature is anyway. It depends on your age, gender, how hot you are after beating one of the health form collectors to a pulp just for being health form collectors, and a whole variety of other factors.

But the MOST ANNOYING aspect of Hong Kong airport by a long long way is.... PEOPLE WHO STOP DEAD (OR WALK UNBVELIEVABLY SLOWLY) ON ONE OF THE MOVING WALKWAYS!!! Why? What's the point? You're not even going up or downhill for Pete's sake. OK, if you're 85 I can see that it might be nice to stand still and let a machine take the strain, but for an average person is it really that much effort to keep walking? And if you are so bloody lazy that you are going to stand still, why stand in the middle? Move over to the side so people who are actually prepared to put 1 foot in front of the other can get past.

And what's point of the warning voice at the end? Are there really people out there who are so stupid they can't work out that when you hit immobile floor at the end of a moving walkway you have to start walking again all on your own? If there are then these are the people we should be testing SARS and Bird Flu vaccines on (preferably the early and highly useless versions of the vaccines). The human race could do without them.

Now it's off to the bar for a pre-flight G&T to calm me down. 1st meeting in Auckland is 3 hours after we land tomorrow morning so going to adopt my usual tactic of a skinful and a couple of sleeping pills to get me through the night.

1 last thing before I go. "Good morning and welcome to New Zealand. Please wind your watches back 10 years." An old joke but based on my only previous visit very true. If you ever wondered where all the world's hippies disappeared to, try looking in Auckland. It's like a time warp.