Around 20 years ago my grandma was making the trip from China to join us in the UK.

She was in her 70s, couldn't speak a word of English, spoke Mandarin with a strong accent and was illiterate. So we booked her into a direct flight and my parents and I (I was 7 then) waited dutifully at Heathrow for her to arrive.

Except her flight didn't arrive. At first it was labelled 'delayed'. This continued for hours. Then it just disappeared from the boards. My parents, with their broken English, were panicked. We slept on the floor in Heathrow airport that night as they struggled to locate the plane. The first of many nights I have since spent in airports and definitely the most scary.

Around 36 hours later we found out the plane had been held up somewhere and we, as Chinese people did in those days, sought the help of the Chinese Embassy. The Embassy actually provided us with accommodation for 2 further nights until my grandma arrived at Heathrow, 3 days late, but happy, healthy and completely unruffled and unconcerned.

She said she'd had a nice time with some ladies from another province in China who'd looked after her and we had nothing to worry about. She wasn't sure what had happened but they'd landed somewhere and she'd been given a place to stay and good food. She's even made good enough friends to give a few of the ladies our address, which my mum had written down for her. A few months later, we received a letter from one of these ladies with a photo of my grandma standing in front of St Basil's Cathedral in Moscow.