I’m told that the boiling frog syndrome is a myth. The popular belief is that if you suddenly immerse a frog in boiling water it will jump for its life, but if you put the same frog in cold water and then gradually heating the water to boiling point, it will not react and perish.




True or not, the syndrome describes something we all recognise. If you see your grandkids every day, you hardly notice them growing. But if there is a gap of three years between sightings, you will notice a massive change. If you want to be depressed, try looking at a photo of yourself from ten years ago and then looking in the mirror.



Most examples are negative ones. If something bad creeps up on you slowly, you will not see it. But the same is true with good things. I’ve used the example before about learning to sing, that I like to try out a piece from a couple of years ago every so often. It is only then I notice that the piece that used to be tough is now easy, and I can be sure I have progressed.



I was struck by a different example last week, when I had a particularly trouble-free travel experience, including a wonderful time interval of less than fifteen minutes between my plane touching down and my emergence from the terminal. In travel and suchlike, we only tend to register when things go wrong. Hence we complain, and we tend to conclude that progress has been in a negative direction.



But my happy experience of last week led me to reflect on the typical journey I would have made twenty years ago, and how it has changed for the better.



First of all, my choice of destinations twenty years ago would have been more limited. For those places I could travel, there was probably only one airline flying, and that only once per day. The price was higher, even without allowing for inflation. To book, I would have had to use a travel agent, where I sat for ages in a queue, before dealing with someone who alternated between bad computer screens and endless phone calls to confirm my booking. Remember?



Next, the journey to the airport. It says on the ticket to allow two hours before travel, and in those days it really meant it. What is more, that meant allowing three hours in practice, because of the frequent traffic jams approaching the airport, the huge distance to the car park and the infrequency of busses to the terminal.



Once inside the airport, I would queue in a long line of people at check in, holding a ticket so large that it would not comfortably fit in my pocket (why did we need those?). I never understood why it seemed to take each party in front of me in the queue three or four minutes to complete the simplest procedure. Nowadays we have e-tickets, internet check in, and baggage drop (though I still don’t understand why that bit takes as long as it does).



Then there were several more lines before getting onto the plane, all asking overlapping information that an integrated service would remove the need for. This part hasn’t improved in twenty years, indeed it may have got worse, because of the added security checks these days.



Perhaps the biggest improvement is once we are actually in the plane. Can you remember how frequent it was that the incoming plane was late, and then seemed to take forever to turnaround? Easyjet have mastered the 30 minute turnaround, and other carriers have slowly copied that. Then we could often sit in the plane for an hour waiting for a take-off slot. Despite that, once we had taken off and flown to the destination, it seemed de rigeur to circle the airport a couple of times before coming in to land. Nowadays, air traffic control seems to work almost flawlessly. Apparently, we are less likely to bump into another plane than in those days as well.



Finally, on arrival, it was more common to have to wait for a vacant gate, the passport queues were longer (now, praise be, we even have Schengen), and the luggage comes more quickly as well. I even think incidents of luggage not arriving are less frequent too.



Of course when it goes wrong it still goes wrong, and delays can be hours, whether due to weather or mechanical failure. Even there, at least nowadays most airports have humane spaces to wait in with at least a modicum of facilities.



The improvements continue once we have started our business in the foreign country. Twenty years ago, money was always a problem, with lots of cash (where legal), bought at the airport for exorbitant rates, those quaint things called travellers cheques, and long queues at banks. Now ATM’s usually process foreign debit cards, and credit cards work nearly everywhere, and both of these services rip us off a lot less.



Then there are communications. Remember queuing at a foreign post office to make a phone call home? Or, in the early days of computers, the utter impossibility of connecting to any useful service? Mobile phones and the internet have changed all that.



So, next time you are delayed or stuck in a queue, remember what travel used to be like, and celebrate the progress we have made. You might at the same time celebrate progress in other areas. Infant mortality for example. Or the defeat of smog, at least in most countries. We are somewhat attuned to moan, and it is good for us to put our moans in perspective every so often.



On this happy note, this blog might go into hibernation for a month or two now, due to some momentous events coming up in my life. This weekend I’m getting married again, and a week later the family are moving to New York City. Even those this should be more trouble-free than it would have been twenty years ago, I somehow don’t think finding a connection and sitting down to blabber to a keyboard for an hour will loom large in the priorities in the coming weeks. I’ll be back though, hopefully and God willing in July, and can start to reflect on new beginnings in some letters from America.