Gatwick flies in the face of all that is civilised

At 7.20am, access to the airport resembles a stock-car racetrack. I stumble into the darkness and the rain to weave my way through hundreds of equally bewildered passengers and random blocks of concrete intended to frustrate the saboteur. I think the naughty thought that here a terrorist's bomb might ultimately be a force for good, for this is public architecture at its very worst, featureless and baffling. At last in the departure hall I am instructed to book in on a machine but I have no idea how to communicate with it. I am watched by an official as a warder in a lunatic asylum might watch his most pathetic inmate; eventually he points to a labyrinthine queue half a mile away, and there I experience the exquisite relief of checking in with a real live human being.

It is now past 8am. An official directs me to another queue, far away and out of sight. I have a pacemaker and refuse to go through security's electronic arch; instead, a young man pats and strokes me here and there, touches my testicles but not the pacemaker. Off come my shoes; I do not wear socks and prints of my higharched feet are etched in talcum powder on the floor. In my bag, the spray that eases angina rouses suspicion: I refrain from saying that it is made from nitroglycerine.

By 8.20 I am in urgent need of coffee and the loo. The latter is at the far end of another hall and on a balcony, the narrow passage to it obstructed by the queues for breakfast at a halfdozen restaurants. The loo is ridiculously small, crowded with men waiting not only to get into a stall, but to stand at the urinals. There is just time to pee but not to get coffee before my gate number is called, and then, of course, the traveller discovers that notices directing us to gates are tiny and insignificant compared with those of newsagents and a thousand other shops.

Who designed this nightmare place, its disorder, confusions and bewilderments? Perhaps, years ago, it worked well enough with half the flights but now it is sheer hell in every aspect that really matters. Checking in should be easy, speedy and reassuring. Get rid of the shops, I say, enlarge the loos and restaurants, install more seats and give us larger, clearer, signs.

Paraphrasing Scott on the South Pole: "Great God! This Gatwick is a ghastly place."