For the first time in years, I’ve chosen a late-night flight back from Greece to Bristol.

I’m not brilliant at flying at night. This is not because I get airsick or plane-scared or anything like that, for what could be better than being safely cocooned in a clever metal box that flies by magic or lift or something and looking down at a view only naturally available to birds and angels? – but because over the course of my adult lifetime I’ve inadvertently neglected to amass enough cash to fly first class or invest in a private jet, and so instead have to try to sit still in a space that any self-respecting sardine would consider tight, without allowing my sleepy head to loll on to a complete stranger’s shoulder and dribble on it.

However, this year the choice was between a very early morning start – get to the airport for 5am – or the midnight express. And at 9am, over a leisurely breakfast, the midnight option we’ve chosen seems absolutely the best call.

At noon, when we’re sitting in a seaside taverna enjoying a close encounter with some of those very sardines that would rather die than end up in Seat 36B – and spookily, so they have – and watching other holidaymakers waving goodbye from their coaches, it seems like a stroke of genius.

Still the feel-good factor pervades us as we stretch out on the afternoon beach, and we are two of just a handful of happy stragglers splashing about in the early evening sea.

Over dinner at 8pm, encouraged by half a litre of locally produced wine and half a kilo of locally produced sheep, we can’t congratulate ourselves enough.

It’s only when I sit down in Seat 36B, next to a kindly looking elderly man with a hearing aid and another man without one – after all, my husband would never invest in a hearing aid in case it meant he could hear me – that I remember why night flights are not my thing.

For some bizarre reason – maybe we’re taking the polar route – it’s going to take us three and a half hours to get back, when it only took two and a half to get there.

By the time we finally touch down in Bristol, it’s 3.30am by my body clock, and when I see the taxi driver with our name on a card I could weep with joy. At least I should get a kip in the car. I get in and close my eyes.

Ten minutes later, my husband leans over to the driver. I open my eyes. We’re in a small unlit country lane. I don’t think this is the way out of the airport, my husband says gently. Ah, says the driver. They’ve changed all this since I was last here. He takes my husband’s advice, reverses, and follows the rest of the traffic on the more conventional route.

Twenty minutes after that, I hear my husband say Er. I open my eyes. I think you want to go straight on there, he’s continuing, as I realise we’re driving into a small industrial estate in Bristol. Ah, I think you’re right, says the driver congenially. Thanks. They’ve changed all this since I was last here.

You can imagine what happens when we reach the area that is now home to Cribbs Causeway. Still, looking on the bright side, I haven’t ever had a personal tour round the entire centre of Bristol before.

My husband, who despite my occasional waspish observations is actually very mild and kind in real life (apparently!), bites his lip slightly as we attempt to exchange the M32 for the M4, for although we are both willing the driver to do so he seems less so inclined, and it’s only after another quick reminder that at the last minute he veers off to the left, neatly avoiding a return trip to St Paul’s.

When we get home I give the driver a huge tip, partly because I feel for him – he and I share the homing instinct of a blind racing pigeon with total amnesia – and also because I feel a huge sense of relief.