For the journey home I pick up a cheap and typically delicious freshly made sandwich and some pastries from an angelic assistant in a bakery in Neukölln S-bahn station.  As she looks into my eyes I feel like we are the only two people on the planet.

Leaving Berlin Schönefeld the airport security are military, the female head guard stands at the back observing everything, the whole team are clean, clear and polite about their explanation of everything with a demeanour that increases a feeling of security.

I arrive back in Manchester.

The advanced new passport scanning ticket machines they were bragging about on the plane promised to speed up our arrival are all broken.  Through passport control, a group of huge paratroop boot armed-to-the-teeth security officers stand huddled together in a useless lump as I trudge past with a backpack, tired eyes and a bike helmet one leans forward in challenge, but alI I see is a little mouse in a bullet proof vest.

I wait as a new baggage carousel smashes a guitar into a holdall and throws three bags on to the floor.  I unpack my bike.  My front wheel is warped and the rear derallier is bent into the back wheel.  Clearly seeing that I’m upset, two useless airport staff are watching the whole thing and one thinks he’s found a joke in the dark echoing caverns inside his head and can’t resist opening his face,

“Have you brought your cagoule as well?  It’s just started raining!”

Leaving the baggage claim, new sophisticated automatic non walk-back chambers lock 3 different people inside including a little boy alone in-between the double door entry/exit system and it won’t let him in or out.  He looks scared.

Starving, I head to the shop and buy a sandwich in a pre-packaged triangle that has miraculously managed to fail in being air-tight, sweat in the middle yet have stale dry bread on the outside.  It tastes foul and makes me feel sick.

England doesn’t feel like home anymore.