There’s a certain type of optimism required in order to board a flight in the middle of the first official storm of the season. It’s the same sort of misplaced confidence that has you ordering the garlic cheese chips at 3am, or believing politicians when they promise to fix the housing crisis again. You know, deep down, that disappointment probably awaits.

Last Friday, I was on a Bristol-Dublin flight with some colleagues after our TV show wrap party, and what followed was less a flight and more a masterclass in corporate indifference scripted by Quentin Tarantino. Not to put too fine a point on it.

It didn’t auger well when we sat on the Bristol tarmac for the first hour while Storm Amy did her level best to rearrange the furniture outside us. Fair enough; safety first and all that. Then we took off into a tumble-dryer sky and struggled our way up to cruising altitude before crossing the Irish Sea at our leisure; the last bit of calm we would experience for a while.

The approach to Dublin was where things got properly hairy. The pilot made two attempted landings and twice pulled up at the last minute to go around. By this point, I’d made my peace with several deities and last year’s All-Ireland hurling final.

Unfortunately, this meant that we didn’t land at all and we swooped out over Dublin a second time and continued on our merry way back across the Irish Sea (this time to Manchester) with the rest of Ireland being a complete no-go with wind.

Landing in Manchester was what the kids called ‘zero craic’ but we got down, and it was a relief to be on terra firma again, even if the wrong flags were flying over it.

This is where the real fun began. And the waiting. There were babies and elderly people on board. A young couple behind us had a one-year-old who was being remarkably calm about the whole ordeal. The adults, meanwhile, were beginning to fray. Within the first hour of sitting in a tin can, two medical emergencies required ambulances. Then some genius opened the emergency door in frustration, so the airport police had to be called. That took another hour, before she was escorted away in a police van. The general sense on the plane was of a calm abiding, but it only took a few characters to unsettle the whole thing.

To add to the feeling of the whole episode being plotted out by some mischievous screenwriter, I should point out that the entire Scarlets rugby squad was on board, getting progressively more irate as the evening wore on. My work colleague, a consummate artist and musician, sat down amongst them at the rear of the plane like a quiet native plant in a sea of burly rhododendrons.

Their match against Connacht had been called off so they had no interest in a kamikaze mission back to Dublin. Fair play to them: it’s hard to argue with thirty huge dudes who could bench press the plane if they felt like it. And their leader was now in a one-on-one debate with the pilot concerning their dissatisfaction and preference to leave the plane.I won’t sugarcoat it; we sat there for a further six hours. SIX HOURS. On a plane. Waiting to fly back into the storm we’d just escaped.

Throughout all this, the airline’s communication strategy was completely abysmal, in this fair writer’s opinion. Scant updates. Cabin crew passing the buck. The pilot doing his best impression of the boring priest from Father Ted on the intercom. To top it off, we witnessed passengers who were forced to queue up to buy food at the top of the plane, to live off overpriced Pringles and white wine while the baby behind me was sucking on UHT milk sachets that a kind fellow passenger had procured for his parents. Classy.

At 11pm, which was NINE HOURS after boarding in Bristol, we were told the flight was cancelled, a decision that surely could have been made hours earlier. When we got into the terminal, there was not a sinner to guide us to where we needed to go.

It quickly began to dawn on us, like that moment in Planet of the Apes when Charlton Heston realised he’d been on Earth all along. There would be no hotels arranged. No transport organised. No guidance on what to do. Even though these things were specifically promised to us on the plane. I heard it.

It was now after midnight on a Friday in Manchester.

We winged it (pun intended) and after many phone calls, found ourselves some hotel rooms at around 3am. One of the last sights I saw leaving the airport was the young couple with the baby, due in Ireland the following day for a family wedding, trying to find their way home to Bristol. In years gone by, Ireland was a poor place and, often, the only flight most people took was to emigrate. Since then, air travel has been revolutionised and democratised, giving Ireland access to new cultures and markets and playing a huge part in opening up Eastern Europe.

But we also have a tradition in Ireland called Meitheal, where the community came together in times of harvest or need, and helped each other out. The good news is that I saw lots of evidence of this tradition on the plane in Dublin last Friday. People were remarkably good natured and co-operative, despite all the hardship we suffered, waiting, white wine, and Pringles. The calm after the storm.