A Boat-Buying Trip Went Horribly Wrong

NICK BURNHAM: What started as a routine flight to trial a boat that I was hoping to buy ended up as a comedy of errors culminating in a near sinking

- Nick Burnham

Mr Bond, they have a saying in Chicago. Once is happenstance, twice is coincidence, the third time it’s enemy action.’ It’s one of my favourite lines from Ian Fleming’s 007 book Goldfinger, and one that I recently had cause to remember after my own triple whammy of bad luck. During a non-leap year, the days and dates of February and March align precisely. So, if you intend to book a flight on 12 February, which is a Sunday, and you accidentally select 12 March, it is still a Sunday, robbing you of the usual warning sign that you’ve picked the wrong month. This interesting snippet of information came into my life courtesy of a nice man at Bristol Airport, as he pointed out to me why my boarding pass was failing to open the turnstile. Bugger! I fly a lot, and I’ve never managed to do this before. It was made worse by the fact that I’d also booked for a friend, and worse still by the news that the easyJet flight we were trying to board was already fully booked. We were on our way to Ireland to view and sea