Istanbul; Monday, 20 December, 2021

I only had a couple of hours left in the city, as my taxi was booked for 13:45 – in recognition that the traffic in Istanbul out to the airport can take a very long time and that was the latest time the transfer company wanted to risk it for my 17:30 departure back to the UK.

After heading out of the hotel I headed back up to the Grand Bazaar to have a much longer wander around the maze of passageways and stalls inside.

From the Grand Bazaar I walked down through the narrow streets of the old town, past many more markets and stalls down to the Egyptian Bazaar and hand another wander through the spice market, before catching the tram back up to the Hippodrome and stopping there for a quick cup of coffee before it was time to head back to the hotel to pick up my luggage and wait for my taxi.

The taxi actually arrived a little early, and at the other entrance of the hotel – which was a bit of a surprise as I didn’t know the hotel had another entrance. Thankfully, one of the gentlemen on reception walked me down to the lower entrance of the hotel and got my stuff into the taxi.

In the end it turned out that the traffic on a Monday afternoon wasn’t as bad as the transfer company had feared and, despite some congestion through the city centre, I was out at the airport a little after 14:30 and therefore had about a half hour to kill before my flight even got checkin desks assigned, in the meantime I’d gone for a wander along the massive airport checkin area, so by the time our desks were announced in zone C I was already up at zone M, so had quite a long walk back to checkin before heading through security and into the equally cavernous airport beyond.

The journey through the airport and the flight were all uneventful, but as we approached the gate at Heathrow it was clear that things were staring to go wrong. We first had to wait 10 minutes for someone to come up switch on the guidance lights for the pilots to be able to line the plane up correctly. Even at this point we were still on-time, so nothing much was going to be a problem, but then we just sat there.

After 20 minutes the pilots updated us that BA was having staffing problems with the ground crews and they would get to us as soon as possible to get the jet bridge attached, about 10 minutes later the lights come on in the jet bridge and it inches forward a couple of feet before grinding to a halt. 40 minutes later, and now 70 minutes after our scheduled arrival time stairs are finally attached to the back of the plane and we are disembarked that way to turn my last flight of the year into the worst one by some way.