Munich airport is probably a dreary place at the best of times. Tonight it seems like some kind of torture as the hour of our flight back to the UK comes and goes with barely an acknowledgement from the ground staff as we sit in the departure lounge waiting to board our flight home.

This photo is taken with the camera balanced on a table in front of the window and I didn’t have anything other than basic kit with me so no polarising filter to take away reflections. The strange black blocks are the seats in front of me!

I’m not feeling very proud of myself today because I’ve lost my temper twice. It’s nearly two years since I last lost it and probably five years before that – I’m normally ‘Mrs Positive’ but no sleep last night to go with every other night since last Thursday has left me decidedly grumpy and I’m still starving hungry. I’ve not had a meal now since yesterday morning because lunch today was another slab of dead pig. Strangely it was also a really smelly dish and as I came back into the room after a ‘comfort break’ the smell of meat hit me and churned me up.

My first outburst came when my poor colleague was asking me to change a chart that I’d put into the sales presentation for our new service because she preferred a slightly different chart. She was really determined about it and making her point strongly. I couldn’t see why the chart that was in the deck needed changing because I felt it was simple and could be explained easily by any of our sales people. It just suddenly seemed so trivial in the grand scheme of things that I just exploded. Any other day, I’d have just let it wash over me and changed the chart but for whatever reason I got mad. It wasn’t pretty.

The second one came when, after eventually boarding our flight an hour later than its scheduled time, we finally got airborne and the flight attendant brought around sandwiches. He dumped a pack in front of me and it was quite clear that the pack contained two halves of a sandwich that clearly had meat in one of the halves. Now I’d been looking forward to some sustenance because of the experiences of the previous twenty four hours and being presented with another slab of dead pig did nothing for my already failing humour. I commented that I’d booked a vegetarian meal and the flight attendant said there was a cheese sandwich in with the ham one. I lost it again. That is such poor service – firstly the fact that it didn’t occur to Lufthansa that someone who is a veggie wouldn’t want a cheese sandwich that had been sharing a box with a ham one for who-knows-how-long and at the very least getting ingrained with its flavour and smell even if it wasn’t actually contaminated. Secondly, the fact that the flight attendant didn’t accept that it was a problem when I pointed it out to him.

I wonder if they would have shown the same cavalier disrespect for someone who’d ordered a Kosher meal or a Hindu one? I hope not because if they do then they’ll soon have no customers with special dietary requirements.

So, for the second time since making my pledge not to let these people off the hook, I complained about the standard of vegetarian food that they supply and I eagerly await their response.

Still, at least I am on my way home.

My year ago pic was a rant about a crummy film, shamelessly knicked from a fantastic book.