BA lands in the brown stuff over a power cut. Next we’ll blame it for turbulence

And in other news last week, a group of jumper enthusiasts called Skytrax left their Thermos flasks and B&Q folding chairs at the end of the runway at Heathrow and announced through their swollen adenoids they’re thinking of taking away British Airways’ coveted four-star status.

If the binocular boys from the plane-spotting community go ahead with their threat, BA will be ranked in the tables alongside the national carriers of Burma, Ethiopia and Uzbekistan.

Apparently, this has something to do with the fact that the seats in economy are now suitable only for the sort of people you see in an L. S. Lowry painting, and the food served back there would be rejected by most dogs. Well, I can’t comment on that because I haven’t turned right on a plane for years.

I suspect mostly, though, the main reason BA is facing a downgrade to junk status is that at the start of the half-term break it suffered a global computer crash that caused its fleet to become stuck in a giant game of Musical Statues. Many people’s holidays were ruined, thousands of business meetings had to be cancelled and there was chaos. I saw it first hand. Angry-looking Heathrow security people were barring the doors, and there was much wailing and gnashing of teeth from those who were being inconvenienced. And then more wailing and gnashing when I was waved through after flashing my BA gold card.

Naturally enough, the trade unions say the global crash happened because BA recently outsourced its entire computer setup to a small industrial unit at 4b Queen Victoria Way, Calcutta. Whereas BA says it was because of an electricity surge.

I’m not sure quite what’s meant by this. Does the power supply suddenly come in a big lump? Do all your lightbulbs start to glow very brightly and does your washing machine swell up to the size of a chest freezer?

I thought it all sounded a bit far-fetched. Until I went to my little cottage in the country last weekend. Seemingly, there’d been what news reporters who want jobs on American television call a power ‘outage’, caused, according to Scottish and Southern Electricity, by ‘trees coming into contact with our network’. A snappy line, that.

Now, in the olden days, when we had three-day weeks and I had to watch Top of the Pops on a small black-and-white TV powered by the battery from my dad’s Ford Cortina, the power would start flowing again after a while and everything that had gone off would start to work once more.

Not any more. The power ‘cut’, as I shall call it, because I already have a job with a US broadcaster, had caused all the digital sensors that govern our lives to become confused, and as a result I was cast back into the fourteenth century.

Obviously, the wi-fi had gone. Even at the best of times, wi-fi routers are less reliable than an Austin Allegro, so after a power cut they sit there flashing their meaningless lights as you say to a man on the other end of the phone that you’ve already turned it off and on again. Three times.

No matter, I thought: I can do without my Instagram fix for one evening and catch up on a box set instead. Nope. The television could provide me with only terrestrial stations, which at four in the afternoon meant a selection of shows featuring men with silly moustaches going round auction houses with some uncomfortable-looking old people who thought that after they had sold their chintzy teapot they would have enough in the bank for a world cruise.

Quickly, I became stupefied by this, so I decided to have a shower. At first things went well. I was able to get a good lather going in my barnet, but then the water just stopped. Unlike your water, mine is pumped from a stream at the bottom of the garden and into a purification plant that is located in what is officially the dustiest, dirtiest barn in the world.

And that is where I found myself, squelching through guano and decomposing rodents, to find out what had gone wrong. And when I finally found the circuit board, I couldn’t see it because of all the soap in my eyes, so I fumbled about with all the switches and levers until the dust and the dirt had mixed with the shampoo to turn my entire hair into a massive breeze block.

Unable to hold my head up properly, I stumbled back through the lake of pigeon crap to the cottage, where I used a hammer to free my head from the concrete. And there I sat, with rubble in my hair, watching another man with another moustache explaining to an old dear that her teapot had fetched £2.75 and she wouldn’t be going on a cruise.

Now, this is a small house in the Cotswolds and it was plunged into the Middle Ages because – in English – some branches had been blown by the wind into power cables. So it’s entirely plausible BA was crippled by some kind of disruption to its power supply.

I like BA, as a rule. I like being welcomed on board by a homosexual in grey flannel trousers. I like the soothing, confident tones of its pilots. And I really like Terminal 5, especially the check-in facilities for gold-card members.

That one of the windmills it is undoubtedly forced to use to offset its carbon emissions had a hissy fit and wrecked all its computers is just plain bad luck. And that’s no reason to give it the same rating as an airline where you get beaten up, or where you get slapped for not putting your seatbelt on (that happened to me recently), or where you have about as much chance of surviving the flight as a prisoner in one of General Augusto Pinochet’s detention centres.

11 June 2017