Since the terrorist attacks on New York’s twin towers, Americans have gone overboard on security to the point now where even the slightest amount of pleasure that may have been had from travelling by air has been blown clean away. And a great example of this is the security line at Washington’s Dulles airport that snakes around and around just about all the available space of the airport building in this huge, never-ending conga line of irate, sweaty humanity many of whom, I suspect, may be starting to cultivate terrorist ideas for themselves as they fantasise on ways to move up in the line. This queue is so long and moves so slowly there just has to be the occasional death or heart attack and tempers must get frayed to breaking point. And with just a little under one hour to our flight departure to Nashville and having already flown the Atlantic and endured US Customs and Immigration, we saw this Queue from Hell where the first problem is locating the end so you can join it.

Shoulders visibly sagging – thinking of an unwanted overnight stay at yet another airport hotel because there was no way in hell we would catch this plane and then we’d have to join the damn queue again the next day – I started off in search of the tail of this enormous beast. But when I look round my wife was not with me. Instead she was chatting to this young guy in a security uniform who appeared to be one of the queue ‘guards’. And then she’s waving me back.

To cut a long story short, I have this friendly and helpful guy to thank for allowing us to skip the queue and jump to the very front. See? Sometimes truly good things do happen. We made the flight with about 10 minutes to spare. And why did he help us?

Was it because my wife explained to him that our Atlantic flight was late arriving so we had little time to transfer to our flight? Not exactly – although it might have helped. Was it the look of desperation in her eyes and her winning English accent? No – but it may have helped. Did she tell him that the previous week I had suffered a Deep Vein Thrombosis and shouldn’t even be flying and definitely should not be standing around in a long queue? Not that – although it might have helped.

The key to this fantastic gesture was all of the above but was mainly down to the image of Johnny Depp on my wife’s t-shirt. The nice young man explained that his girlfriend would never forgive him if she discovered he had not helped a fellow Johnny Depp fan. So we need to thank the guy at the airport, his girlfriend and Johnny Depp for all coming together at the same time to deliver us safely on a plane to Tennessee.