Do elders really deserve our respect? Now, before you rush to the comments section to tear me a new Scottish-shaped one, I mean, I respect everyone as a default. I find that if someone doesn’t deserve my respect they show me pretty quickly who they are and I believe them.

Recently, I was, as I often am, in an airport trying to get through security. It was a chaos of shouting, those little clear baggies spilling out liquids, and belts being whipped from belt loops like a 1990s soft porn film. Amongst all of this there was a woman, perhaps around 60, with her father who was clearly well into his eighties.

I find that people lose all sense of reason at security in airports. Even if I’ll later see them in departures lolling unhurriedly over their second glass of wine, it seems everyone must get through straight away when they are in close proximity to the x-ray machine and those little plastic trays. In this case those in a hurry were two elegant women in their late twenties, wearing shapeless, very expensive coats with long sheets of glossy hair framing their make-up and pore-free faces. But after I noted their beauty, what I noticed most was their impatience.

Read more by Kerry Hudson

Ahead of them in our queue, the other woman helped her father sort through his liquids, remove his boots and rifle through his rucksack to remove an iPad. They weren’t slow in the least but they were,........

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