Any kerfuffle is an interesting kerfuffle when you have been staring at the carpet in Brussels airport for two hours-and this is one has some promising ingredients. Through the glass wall separating our departure gate from the rest of the world I can see this glamorous lady on a verge of a fist fight with five Belgian policemen. The row seems in some mysterious way to be connected to the ladies toilets; but though I crane and eavesdrop I can’t work out how.

Happily fate sometimes smiles on busy bodies, and so on the flight to Nairobi, I find myself sitting next to the glam woman who tells me the whole disturbing story. As she walked into the ladies, my neighbour says, a female attendant rushed and dragged out a ‘no entry’ sign across her path. My neighbour raised her eyebrows, the attendant said: “Use the men’s toilets!” then she hissed: “black bitch!”

My neighbour began to complain, so the attendant took a step forward and slapped her cheek. Another toilet goer witnessed the scene from the basin area, so she run to fetch the police and asked them to arrest the lunatic attendant.

But when they arrived (and this is almost the worst bit) the police were indifferent to the point of hostility. The laughed, spoke amongst themselves in Flemish, then turned to my neighbour and said: “You can make an official complaint but if you do, you’ll miss your flight, just forget it.” It was then that the kerfuffle broke out.

I sit in silence for a while after the woman falls silent, watching the plane on my TV screen track across North Africa wondering whether recession induced racism was about to take over Europe. What are you going to do? I asked my neighbour if she would sue. “No, no, I won’t sue. I am just glad to be going home to a civilised country.” She is Liberian, travelling home via Nairobi. She says Liberians, are polite, they help each other out and they don’t smack foreigners on the face. I believe her.

In Nairobi I see family and friends and embrace the idea of ‘cutting back’. I am naturally extravagant; I am also naturally spectacularly useless with money. My financial idiocy is a secret to me alone. No one can be told least of all-relatives. They must not see that for decades I have been completely dependent on my overdraft facility and on assorted loans and in long periods of panicdenial-panic cycle. That I have come across my fair share of bailiffs over the years (one year they appeared on December 23 which was nice. I was out shopping)