If it had just been the last ten passengers who were boarding, or if this was the only hiccup along the way, I probably wouldn’t have bothered writing any of this.

But as I remember it, the misery was systematic—from the moment we started booking to the moment we left the final airport. At every step, Ryanair seemed to go out of their way to make things unpleasant—unless, of course, we paid an extra £15 here, £20 there, and so on—for each passenger, and for every inconvenience it seemed they’d quite clearly engineered.