QUESTION: How many miles is it from Kennedy airport in New York to London’s Heathrow? Answer – 3,452 miles, gate to gate. Here’s another question – how many miles is it from Heathrow to York? If you’re travelling by road it’s 209 miles, a little less by rail starting from London King’s Cross.

So how come it took me longer to get back home after flying in to Heathrow from New York the other day?

We’d saved up for a whirlwind visit to attend the wedding of close friends and after a day of joyous celebration that had left us a little delicate round the edges were looking forward to collapsing into our own bed.

With strong tail winds pushing us home, the trans-Atlantic flight took us just five hours and 53 minutes, thus making it not too much of an ordeal in our giant steel Smartie tube. Even the food wasn’t that bad.

So we were feeling somewhat chipper when we landed at Terminal 5 thinking it would be a breeze to cross the UK border, given that we were UK nationals and therefore wouldn’t have to run the immigration gauntlet about to be experienced by our foreign fellow travellers. We might even be able to catch the 9pm train home...

Oh, how wrong we were. The immigration hall at Heathrow, run in shambolic fashion by the UK Border Agency, was an abject lesson in how not to exercise crowd control. And people think entering the United States is an ordeal, with its queues, fingerprint machines and iris cameras, fronted by stern and unsmiling immigration officials. But at least they know how to direct people to where they need to be in a calm and orderly fashion.

Heathrow though, was something else – a veritable free-for-all that had hundreds of people descending on the immigration hall with no one there to direct people into the right lanes depending on their status.

People pushed and shoved their way to where they thought they ought to be, mums with tired babes-in-arms struggling to protect their infants from the onslaught of determined backpack-wearing, suitcase-wheeling travellers using their cabbage luggage as battering rams to push their way through to the front of what turned out to be a hugely disorganised queue.

Frankly, it was claustrophobically frightening. And no one got over the border any quicker for their efforts either. By the time we were squirted through to the other side, bags had been circling on the baggage reclaim carousel for nearly an hour, causing another chaotic mad dash as people sprinted to retrieve their luggage.

The Heathrow bottleneck and subsequent journey into central London meant we missed that 9pm train by a seething-inducing five minutes causing a miserable wait of nearly another hour, unable to get anything reasonable to eat unless it was one of those lukewarm burgers spread with goo and shrouded in a sawdust-dry bun.

The last train to York out of King’s Cross was late setting off because it had been delayed getting into London in the first place. We weren’t told the reason, which begs the question why in terms of informing the travelling public, train performance information only focuses on individual trains rather than the root cause of the delay.

And then to cap it all, we were diverted via Lincoln and Gainsborough, which would have all been very nice in daylight but was tedious in the extreme at gone midnight.

We eventually arrived home at 01.40 – exactly six hours after landing at Heathrow, meaning our average travel speed back up north was around 35 miles an hour compared to a trans-Atlantic speed of 624. It was almost back to the days of the man walking in front of the train with a red flag...

• IT SAYS a lot for the state of the nation that hordes were stampeding supermarkets to take advantage of a pricing error on booze.

A handful of Tesco stores in Scotland mistakenly offered three boxes of alcoholic drinks for £11 instead of £20 – and bedlam ensued when people phoned their friends with news of the “offer”, some even going home to change their clothes to return and buy more beer.

Social networking sites were awash with the deal, with one Tweeter saying she was casually chatting to her dad about it when he suddenly sprinted to the car and left her standing.

Police were called after heavy congestion was reported as customers rushed to buy up the booze.

Which just goes to show that people are either so fed up of the nation’s state of affairs that they’re turning to drink to numb the pain, that canny Scots have an eye for a bargain, or that regardless of all that’s happening around them they never let anything get in the way of a good old slurp.