And so you took us to Merrie England for a spell.

At Heathrow, fire trucks met us because we landed “heavy,” i.e., still full of fuel we never got to spend over the Atlantic. At the terminal, a woman in a spiffy red American Airlines blazer was sent to greet us. But the language she spoke — Martian — was not easily understood, versed as we were in Spanish, English, Russian and Urdu.

Using her Martian language skills, the American Airlines woman proposed to take us “through the border” at Heathrow, for a night of rest before we resumed our journey the next morning. An apocalyptic scenario: an employee of the world’s worst airline assigned to the world’s worst border crossing at the world’s worst airport.

The Martian took us to one immigration lane, which promptly closed. Then another, with the same result. A third, ditto. Despite her blazer, the Martian was obviously not the ally we had made her out to be. So, ducking under security ropes, knocking some down entirely, we rushed the border with our passports held aloft, proclaiming ourselves the citizens of a fading superpower.

Come morning, you, American Airlines, provided us with a free, daylong tour of Heathrow Airport. By bus. The bus brought us to our new plane, but the doors of the bus would not open. We stood, pressed to one another, in sweltering heat, as the plane was sprayed down for no reason we could discern. It would have been nice, in retrospect, had you sprayed us down, or at least given us something to drink. After an hour, we were told this flight would be canceled because this plane, too, had caught ill. Back to the terminal once more.

It became clear that the older and more feeble of us would be at a disadvantage. A 70-year-old cannot rush past 140 gates to check in for yet another canceled flight with the same brio as a 20-year-old. Some of us started to cry. Not because the journey was never ending, but because you can be told that you are not a human being only so many times.