Reading about all the travel chaos, I began to regret my summer holiday plans. Wouldn’t it have been more sensible just to stay in Acton? But Caroline and I had arranged to go to Ibiza fora friend’s birthday party the weekend before last; then, after returning to London, we were due back in the Balearic Islands, this time with the kids. There was no turning back.

The first thing to go wrong was that our British Airways flight to Ibiza from Heathrow was cancelled. Not that BA notified us. The first inkling I had that something had gone awry was when I tried to check in using the BA app the night before and it said that wouldn’t be possible. Not a definitive sign – the app barely works at the best of times – but it prompted me to go to the BA website, where I discovered the bad news. We’d booked the flights via Iberia Air (don’t ask), so perhaps that was why BA hadn’t let us know.

Anyway, the upshot was that I had to embark on a mad scramble to find an alternative flight – competing with all the other disappointed passengers – while sitting in a pub at 8 p.m. on a Friday surrounded by people I hadn’t seen for 40 years. My friend Sean Macaulay had arranged an impromptu school reunion for our year group at William Ellis, but for the first hour or so I wasn’t able to talk to anyone because I was using my phone’s patchy wifi connection to look for one-way tickets to Ibiza. Eventually, I hit paydirt, but it meant getting to East Midlands airport by noon, which was no picnic given the railway strikes. We made it by the skin of our teeth.

While we were queuing to go through security, Caroline called Iberia to get a refund for the cancelled outbound flight, which proved to be suspiciously easy. She was only on hold for about 15 minutes. Surely nothing connected with travelling in this day and age could possibly be that frictionless? We were right to be wary. On the way home from Ibiza, we queued for an hour to check in to the BA flight – the app wasn’t working, naturally – only to be told that our tickets were invalid. ‘Looks like they’ve been cancelled,’ said the desk clerk. Turned out, Iberia had refunded us for both legs of the journey, though Caroline swore she couldn’t have been clearer. And, no, we weren’t able to purchase a ticket for the flight as it was closing in ten minutes.

That prompted another headlong dash to make alternative arrangements, with any seats being snapped up by travellers who’d been kicked off the over-sold flights. It was like trying to get on the last chopper out of Vietnam. We ended up buying two seats on a Ryanair flight to Stansted that set us back £685.49 and got in at 10 p.m., too late to make the Elizabeth Line connection at Liverpool Street. That meant getting an Uber for £69.25. As you can tell, I made a note of all the figures because I’m thinking of filing a compensation claim with Iberia. Though if I divide the total amount by the number of hours it’ll take, I’ll end up being paid less per hour than the minimum wage, so may not bother.

The trip to Majorca three days later with four teenagers in tow was marginally less stressful, at least to begin with. Perhaps that was because we’d gone for the cheapest possible option, which meant heading back to Stansted to get a Ryanair flight. No messing about with trying to fly BA out of Heathrow, which was smart because BA is less reliable than Ryanair. Last year, BA cancelled 3.5 per cent of flights, compared with 0.3 per cent for Ryanair. It says something about the national carrier that it is now 12 times more likely to cancel flights than Ryanair.

But it all went pear-shaped when we arrived in Palma and Ludo, my 18-year-old son, couldn’t find his passport. ‘I gave it to you, Dad,’ he said. Needless to say, he hadn’t – I’d asked him to when we’d boarded the plane, but he refused. We retraced our footsteps, fighting the tide of disembarking passengers, until we could go no further. We then pleaded with an official to see if a passport had been found on the plane and had to endure an agonising wait while Ludo fretted about having to return to London and I worried about the reaction of the UK Border Force when he turned up without a passport. Would he end up in a detention centre? Miraculously, a flight assistant appeared, smiling at us and waving the passport in the air.

We’re now safely ensconced in a villa near Alcúdia, but daren’t go to the beach because the Spanish authorities have issued an ‘orange alert’, meaning the temperature is likely to be between 40 and 45°C. Should have stayed in Acton.