Cologne; Friday, 22 December, 2006

I checked out of the hotel and walked the short distance to the station to pick up the train to Düsseldorf. After dumping my luggage in the last large locker in Düsseldorf Hauptbahnhof, I caught the S-Bahn out to a small town on the outskirts.

This small town would probably never have been known to the outside world, were it not for the discovery in a small cave in the mid 19th century of remains. The looked strangely human, but different, more powerful with a strange ridge on the skull. Despite similar bones being discovered several years earlier in Gibraltar nobody had taken much notice up until then. With this discovery Human kind suddenly had an ancestor and Neanderthal suddenly became the most widely used German place name in the world.

Toady nobody knows where the cave was that the bones were found in. The whole Neander valley has been destroyed by mining, but a museum in the town has a wealth of information (in both German and English) on the finding of the bones; what they meant to the world at a time, just years after the publication of “On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection”, that was coming to terms with the idea that humans may not have been “placed here” but evolved from other creatures. There are displays on how Neanderthals may have lived, communicated and hunted.

After spending a very long time looking around the museum I walked back up to the station and caught the train back to Düsseldorf and then on by tram to the riverside TV tower.

The tower stands out on the Düsseldorf skyline, despite all the other tall buildings, and from the viewing platform at 175m the views are spectacular. The Rhine meandering its way north towards the sea and towards the south the spires of Cologne Cathedral just about visible (with a squint and a bit of imagination!) By the time I came back down from the tower there was no time left to look around the rest of Düsseldorf, it was time to head back to the airport and hope that I could get home.

The prognosis was not good. All the fog and mist in Germany had been mild to that in London. For three days thick freezing fog had all but closed Heathrow and London City airports with only limited numbers of flights landing. Shortly after arriving at Düsseldorf airport my worst fears were realised. Lufthansa had cancelled all flights back to London. I was sent round to the ticket desk where they transferred me onto a BA flight to Heathrow that should have left 25 minutes earlier, but was delayed for “some considerable time”.

I walked back over to the BA check-in desks and checked in for my flight and headed straight through security and to the gate. By the time I sat down it was 17:00, 40 minutes after the flight should have left and 30 minutes before my original flight should have gone. The purser from the flight appeared at a little before 17:30 and started making announcements about the flight. The earliest slot we could get would not be for another 2 hours.

So it was with a little surprise, after lots of frantic action and the cancellation of two further BA flights that were going to be accommodated on this flight, that at a little after 6pm an announcement came that they would shortly be commencing boarding of the flight as they had managed to get a take-off slot just before 7. It was an even bigger surprise when my boarding card was rejected when I went to board. Due to the number of passengers on the flight BA regrettably had to upgrade me to Business Class.

I may have arrived 90 minutes later than I should have done, into an airport some 20 miles west of my original destination, but I was a comfortable flight, I, unlike a lot of other people, had got home without too much incident, and in style! A very nice Christmas present from BA (not sure how Lufthansa will feel when they get the bill though!)