My summer holidays are coming up. I spend my days looking forward to a week in the north of Spain. Then I go to bed and the dreams start.

These dreams follow pretty much the same script. They start out with me running late for my flight in a hot strange city. I’m almost out of money. Things go downhill from there. I get on the right bus but it is going away from the airport. I hop off and go into a shop to buy a salami sandwich and lemonade. The queue never moves.

I run out onto the street and get in a taxi but can’t explain where I want to go. I try everything from aeropuerto to flughafen but the driver just shouts at me as we drive through a suburb that could be in Mexico City although I’ve never been there. At this point I notice that I’m naked from the waist down. I realise nobody has noticed this yet and start to wonder if can get away with it at the airport.

I’m no psychiatrist, but it’s clear that I have a fear of flying. Not crashing. Flying. I’m terrified of missing my flight next week.

This is why Airline is one of my favourite TV shows of all time. It’s the reality show about Easyjet ground staff in Liverpool and Luton with a voiceover by Baldrick from Blackadder. They’re forever re-running it on Sky.

The show isn’t about the staff. It’s about passengers who mess up.  There’s Rozzer and his stag-party mates who arrive at 8am for the 8:20 to Barcelona and aren’t allowed check in. Rozzer, who has clearly had two cans of Carlsberg Special Brew for his breakfast, is ‘avin none of it. He roars at the Easyjet rep who then pretends to make a phone call to the gate where he says “alright mate, said I’d ask anyway” and tells Rozzer that the answer is still no. This seems to calm Rozzer down. They all book on the evening flight and head to the airport bar. I’d hate to be Rozzer.

Then there’s the small flushed looking woman who looks like she’s going to cry because she arrived for a flight to Italy without her passport. Ok, her brother manages to get it to her just in time despite bad traffic on the M25, but the woman should be ashamed of herself.

Finally, no episode is complete without a small livid French businessman who arrived late off the flight from Nice and now wants Easyjet to pay for his taxi to Aberdeen. He holds up the whole queue for an hour before storming off to the taxi rank without a penny, muttering merde merde merde to himself as he goes. There’s no dignity in that.

Airline is my driller-killer movie. It’s how I confront my fears of messing up at an airport. Well, that and driving my wife crazy.

It’s now six days before we head away. I’ve already taken to checking the passports are in their usual place in the drawer. At least once between now and next Wednesday, I will become convinced that one of them is out of date.

I’ve already started to think about how and when I’m going to pack. It’s a late enough flight, so my wife is going to work that day and come home in time to go to the airport. I think she’s crazy. I’m going to take the day off and hang around the house worrying.

She’ll want to arrive at the airport 90 minutes before take off. That leaves no time for her brother to get to our house and hare up to departures with one of our forgotten passports. She should watch more Airline.

I’ll be like a wreck in the airport. If you see a guy in departures having what looks like a fit as he taps his pockets in turn repeating wallet-passport-keys, wallet-passport-keys, then that’s me. I’ll have my passport and ticket out the minute we join the queue. At some point I’ll sub-consciously put them back in my bag.  Now they’re lost. That’s breakdown territory. My wife will laugh at me. That won’t help.

If we get through the check-in process (that’s a big if) then I can start to worry about forgetting my passport at the security scanner or losing it in the duty free. It’s a Ryanair flight, so next up is a mini-anxiety attack over whether I should stand in the queue for twenty minutes and get a seat or sit down until the queue had moved and then get a seat. I’ll stand. It’s better to be doing something that sitting there expecting the worst. My wife will wait until the queue is gone to board the plane. She’ll sit next to me. I’ll have a quick check that I’m wearing pants and then we’re off on our nice relaxing break.