Flying without feathers is unnatural, and we forget this too easily. We zoom along at 1100kmh and 30,000 feet, ordering drinks. Our penance for the arrogance of flying is having to endure airports.
The concept of the modern airport is pretty much the same as Purgatory. Both are immense departure lounges where thousands of souls fidget, waiting for some unknowable being to summons them on to another place.
But airports get worse. I am sitting in Lyon airport, not far from the spot where, in 1245, at the First Council of Lyon, the church spent a month excommunicating a very naughty Emperor, chose red hats for cardinals, and decided what Purgatory is.
If they'd had Saint-Exupery airport just up the road, they'd have got the Purgatory part done by lunch.
Beginning a trip home from Lyon, we'd fronted check-in, gone through the security X-rays, and been sent past the French police who man passport control.
With an hour to wait, we were busting for a drink. Panting, I pressed the Club Lounge door buzzer, and only then noticed the sign pointing to a temporary entrance back on the other side of passport control.
Damn. We were stuck on the wrong side.
''Bah, police!'' barked the Duchess. Not a woman to let officialdom stand in the way of a gin and tonic, she marched straight back through the gendarmes' lines, parted the dithering queue, and led us into the lounge redoubt.
''Well, I'd love a beer,'' I said to the manageress.
''Carlsberg, Heineken, it doesn't matter.''
She looked at me, and as deadpan as the publican in the Slim Dusty song, said: ''The bar's got no beer. There's some wine in the fridge.''
What??
''Right pickle you've got us in,'' I told the Duchess.
''The pub's got no beer, and we're stuck here. We won't get back past the passport police, because they've already stamped us 'left the country.'''
We choose a queue with a different gendarme and it works. I now have a passport which shows me departing France twice in 10 minutes. Interpol will be at the door shortly.
The next trial is Dubai airport which, as it now tortures a million travellers a week, outstrips Heathrow.
It looks like a gigantic techno earthworm. Airports tend to be grandiose statements of national importance, and the Emirates are already building a bigger one they're calling an ''aerotropolis.''
Spare us. The present place functions only because it contains trains, buses, and a clientele which despite all this, has no choice but to walk until it drops. Our flight disgorges us into a transit lounge only 15m from our next departure gate.
But because of security, we do a 1km route march to reach the gate, a sleepless, conquered, battalion, lugging its pitiful hand baggage, harassed through the security checkpoints and defeated by immense impractical architecture.
The madness continues through Bangkok. We are ejected from our seats into a transit pen, where we are X-rayed to ensure we aren't smuggling bombs off the aircraft we're about to climb back into. We lug our hand baggage around another 1km circle back to the same gangway, where we are searched yet again.
With nothing accomplished but the loss of an hour's sleep, I clamber back into the same seat to stare at breakfast, or perhaps it was dinner. Sydney next. And so it went.
Between the first check-in and arriving back in New Zealand we never - not once - leave a secure area, yet airport security sends us miles in senseless circuits, and we are searched no less than nine times.
Nine times? This is deeply stupid. We accept airport security procedures as holy writ because ''they,'' the experts, must know best.
One mustn't denigrate or joke about airport security. This uncritical attitude is the recipe that has allowed the cumbersome ''damn the customer'' approach to security which airports now inflict on us.
Airports are under little pressure to do improve their clumsy ''one size fits all'' security, which has helped turn travel into a nightmare. They could do so much better.
Anyway, I'm home. For the first time I believe I look as bad as the picture in my passport.
John Lapsley is an Arrowtown writer.
