I never made it to Gordon Ramsay’s. It all started well enough. The Heathrow Express from Paddington slid into Terminal 5 a full 90 minutes before my flight – ample time to get a taste of T5 haute cuisine and grab a free glass of Sancerre at the BA lounge.

True, the queues at checkin in the vast departures hall were a little disconcerting. Why had BA opened only a fraction of its desks? But I had done what I was told and checked in online. I headed straight for security.

It was while I was straightening my tie for the mandatory photograph (BAA has been barred from taking fingerprints) that the doubts began to set in. My boarding pass, the security guard said, would not scan. He could not let me through.

A glitch I thought. Still time for that glass of wine. It was then I met a nice lady from BA. My flight to Newcastle had been cancelled – something to do with ”operational problems” at the terminal. Pressed gently for further elucidation – ”it’s been a mess all day”.

Several other BA staff – all dressed in ‘Can I help you’ t-shirts – were giving the same message to other hapless would-be passengers.

I counted about 100-odd people milling around BA’s cancelled flights desk (only half of them open). Perhaps the young man in one of those t-shirts sensed my rage. He offered to short circuit things by checking by phone whether I could be rebooked on a later flight.

The answer was no – both later flights were full. Would tomorrow morning be okay? No. Would I be compensated for the cancelled flights? Not sure – I would have to write in.

By now I sensed the growing despair all around – the family desperate to return to Hamburg, the elderly gentleman with nowhere to stay overnight. Perhaps he could sleep in T5?

On the train back into Paddington I overheard the woes of incoming passengers. T5, we have been told a thousand times, was built around its state-of-the-art baggage system. The family arriving from Oslo had waited more than an hour for their bags.

I have written about the shambles that is BAA’s Heathrow once or twice before. “Just wait for T5,” BAA executives told me. Well I did. And it was a shambles. What else?