“Like Somebody’s Been Practising Prison Tattoos on a Dwarf Aubergine”

Krakow airport. Or, to give it its full official name, Krakow Balice John Paul II International Airport. Or, to give it its full name in Polish, which we probably should, because it is in Poland, Międzynarodowy Port Lotniczy im. Jana Pawła II Kraków-Balice. Or, to give it as much of its full name as you can read in the list of matches when you search for “airport” on Uber, “Międzynarodowy Port Lotniczy im” - and yes, that’s a single-line text field with no horizontal scrolling support, which is only the third-worst piece of UX I’ve seen caused by a combination of local place names, bad UI design, and inconsistent localisation.

The worst, if you’re wondering, was Sydney, where Charles Kingsland Smith International Airport was listed in the Opal ticket machines as “International”, which was all the more infuriating because they didn’t even have a language barrier to contend with and still managed to fuck it up. The second-worst is trying to buy a train ticket to Cologne (Köln) on Deutsche Bahn’s ticket app, which requires you to know that when Germans translate German into English, Köln becomes Koeln and no alternative spellings or translations will be considered.

Anyway. Krakow airport. A man in a black hat and leather jacket walks very slowly towards the passport gates. He’s walking slowly because yesterday a taxi driver ran over his foot, which is quite remarkable considering that he was actually inside the taxi when this happened. Well, most of him was. His left foot was very much still on the road outside the car and not expecting to become an impromptu chock for a late-model Toyota Corolla, but Polish cab drivers are very efficient people and often so keen to whisk their passengers to their destination that they will often start driving before the doors are closed. If they’ve illegally stopped in a no-stopping zone and the cab driver behind them is honking his horn, that only increases their sense of urgency.

(Yes, a cab ran over my foot, at 08:30 yesterday, on the way to Geecon to give the opening keynote. Actually, “ran over my foot” isn’t 100% accurate, but the injury cannot be properly described without some diagrams. Fortunately I was wearing the Karrimor Skiddaw DD heavy-duty tactical boot, and so I escaped with some excruciatingly painful bruising and a mild case of shock. Did the keynote anyway because I’m a goddamned professional. Also, excellent boots. A+++ would buy again.)

Now, if you asked an international airport “hey, what do you do for fun?”, it would reply “ooh, you know… reading, dancing, but my favourite thing of all is taking a relatively short walk across an unobstructed area, like the straight line from, say, the corridor to the passport control desk, and using those weird poles-connected-by-bits-of-seatbelt to make the walk as long as possible so that if five hundred people show up unexpectedly they can be stacked into a neat fractal structure instead of milling about everywhere!”

Airports LOVE that shit.

Which is fine when there *are* five hundred people waiting to clear passport control… but when there’s only half a dozen of you, it’s just a lot of pointless steps for no reason. Alas, my Polish isn’t up to explaining “an idiot taxi driver ran over my foot so I am circumventing your crowd control barriers because walking is extremely painful and there’s no crowd here to control anyway”, and so I walk the long way around. It takes a while, but I finally get to the front of the nonexistent line, and this is where it gets entertaining

There’s this jolly thing called Schengen. It’s a bit like the Kruger game park: you only deal with border control on the way in and the way out, and once you’re inside you can sort of go wherever you like and amble gently from one country to another. (In most other respects it is not like the Kruger. For starters, it has a lot more Belgians and not nearly so many elephants.)

Since October 2025, the collective governments of the Schengen-area countries (which is basically the European Union plus a few countries like Norway and Switzerland that were rich enough to get included without actually joining the EU proper) have been rolling out a new electronic entry system, called - wait for it, you’ll like this - the Electronic Entry System. EES. The idea is that when visitors enter or leave the Schengen area, their details and photographs and fingerprints get stored in some sort of giant computer thing so you don’t need passport stamps any more.

I crossed the border on Monday, in London, at the Eurostar terminal in St Pancras, where at any given time a handful of extremely bored-looking French police officers will glance at passports and stamp you into Schengen. Except, of course, now there’s no stamps. “Oh”, thinks me, “they must have the new computer thing.” I ask politely “no more stamps? Even if I’m not coming home on Eurostar?” “No, Monsieur, no stamps! Bon voyage!”

(Astute readers with experience of multinational IT projects will be experiencing a sort of spidey sense tingling feeling right about this point.)

(Anybody who has ever been wished “bon voyage” by a member of the gendarmerie will also be experiencing a sort of spidey sense tingling feeling right about this point.)

(If you are in both of these categories, what you are currently experiencing is a “double tingle”. You’re welcome.)

So I go to Brussels, and on to Antwerp, and have a jolly time at Techorama, and fly from Brussels to Krakow, and have another jolly time at Geecon apart from the bit with the taxi and the foot, and now a patient and polite and clearly very confused Polish passport control officer is alternately staring at my passport and her computer screen and trying to figure just how exactly the fuck I got here. Explaining that I entered Schengen in London does not help matters, but when it becomes apparent that the reason I have neither a passport stamp nor a computer record of my entry is something to do with The French, she becomes extremely helpful and asks if I still have my Eurostar ticket, and sure enough there it is saved on my phone, and that’s deemed proof enough that I’m not some sort of spy and I can go home after all.

Until Monday, that is. On Monday I have to go to Luton, because on Tuesday I fly to Timisoara at 8am because Past Dylan is an Asshole who makes Terrible Choices, and the only way to be in Luton at 05:30 is to be there the previous night, so I shall be adding the Luton Airport Ibis to the list of illustrious places I have temporarily called home over the years.

First, though, a weekend in my own home, which I plan to spend on the sofa, occasionally getting a big bag of ice out of the freezer, putting one cube into a glass of single malt scotch and the rest of it into a bag underneath my foot.

(Seriously, my big toe looks like somebody’s been practicing prison tattoos on a sort of dwarf aubergine. It’s horrific.)