On the last four occasions I've visited London, I've arrived at a different airport. Most recently, it was Stanstead which never seems to be crowded and rarely has that sense of frantic activity that is a hallmark of almost all airports.

The possible exception is the delightfully named Flamingo Airport on the Dutch Caribbean island of Bonaire which couldn't possibly be described as anything but relaxed.

I especially like the Bewley's in Stanstead, which manages to make you feel so at ease that you forget you have to take the shuttle to the terminal building and you end up rushing after all. But even rushing at Stanstead has a relaxed feel to it.

But my favourite London airport has to be City airport, though, because there's something really fantastic about stepping off a plane and strolling a few yards to the terminal building instead of going on the extended hikes that both Heathrow (why is it designed so that you feel like you're walking around in an extended metal pipe?) and Gatwick have to offer. And City airport has a rather nice departure lounge to sit in while you're waiting for a flight. Except for the number of businesspeople whose mobiles start chirping, or who feel the need to call someone and impart the thrilling news that they're in the airport departure lounge.

Last time I flew from City airport the bloke sitting opposite me rang his wife (I presume) to tell her where he was. She obviously started to ask him what he wanted for dinner or something equally domestic because he flustered about saying no, it was okay, he'd eaten, no problem. He then made about 10 business calls but I think they were only to try and restore his street cred among the rest of the suits.

Dublin used to have a kind of relaxed feel to it, but not any more. The separate check-in for Aer Lingus flights works better than I first thought when I saw a queue stretching back to Burger King I was suddenly acutely aware that I'd arrived for check-in with less than the obligatory hour in hand. There were hundreds of people ahead of me. A friend of mine who works in retail banking once told me that they were meant to deal with a customer in the queue in less than a minute. I wonder what the standard time for checking in someone with only hand luggage is?

Hand luggage. . . despite the airlines trying to define what should be hand luggage there are always people trying to carrying mini-suitcases onto the plane. However, bags that will happily fit in the overhead locker of a 737 don't quite make it into the lockers in either the Aer Lingus commuter flights or the Cityjet planes. Most of the businesspeople travelling from Stanstead were trying to squash clearly oversized bags into lockers that were designed for a briefcase and a bottle of duty free. There was no need to make the announcement about items becoming dislodged and braining fellow-passengers when you opened the locker, because most items were so fully wedged they'd need a blow-torch to remove them.

Anyway I hope Aer Rianta has got in the fortune tellers to advise them on their expansion of Dublin Airport which, according to the notices on the extremely long walk from Pier A, will double the size of the airport and be completed by the year 2000.

Apparently the stars, the soil and the name itself are all responsible for the disaster which is Hong Kong's $20 billion (£14.2 billion) Chek Lap Kok airport which opened on July 6th. The day after it opened, Hong Kong Air Cargo Terminals had to ship around 2,000 tonnes of cargo back to the old Kai Tak airport because of problems with its new facility. Further problems occurred when a Cathay Pacific plane hit a passenger airbridge causing the authorities to close down the automated ground guidance system.

The feng shui experts say that the name Chek Lap Kok is unlucky but the airport's problems are also due to the fact that, astrologically speaking, this is a bad time for the whole region. Financially speaking it's been pretty awful too, I would have thought.

According to the government, the economy will lose about $600 million because of the air cargo problems which aren't expected to be fully resolved before the end of this month, which is money the region can ill-afford to lose.

So much for modern facilities.

However, the Japanese are doing their best to approach their problems in a new light, having eschewed modernity and appointed the 78 year-old Kiichi Miyazawa as finance minister. Mr Miyazawa, as is customary when offered a post in Japan, said that he was unable to accept, mentioning his age and unsuitability for the position. Then he accepted. Call me naive, but I thought he was being honest when he said he was too old and not able for it. I'm not an ageist (given my own advancing years how can I be) but it can't be easy to drag yourself around the world drumming up support for a beleaguered economy at 78. Hauling yourself around all these airports, battling with the overhead lockers, losing your luggage. . . surely Miyazawa has more peaceful things he could do with his life.

As for his suitability he was finance minister in the 1980s when Japan's bubble economy bubbled at its fiercest and set the tone for the disasters that were to follow. He lost his job over a corruption scandal (nothing new there) but he was elected prime minister in 1993 when he (wrongly) announced that the economy was turning around because of fiscal expansion. Now he's back.

Yet the markets want to take him at face value, even when his first pronouncement that the markets should determine the level of the yen sent it plummeting and caused him to have to qualify his comments afterwards. An analyst was quoted as saying that "it's third time lucky for him".

Oh, really? I don't want to be a complete pessimist but I think it'll take more than luck and a consultation with a feng shui expert.

Anything else is just a flight of fancy.

Sheila O'Flanagan is a fixed-income specialist at NCB Stockbrokers