Tere tulemast!

Checking in from Tartu, Estonia after a rollercoaster ride from Gatwick on Monday evening/Tuesday morning, and trying to get to grips with the Estonian keyboard, with its own keys for ö, ä, ü and õ and a rather disconcerting lack of an @ key, despite the media labelling this "E-stonia". Outside is beginning to resemble a nicely iced Christmas cake, after the heaviest snowfall for 20 years - coincidentally, since the end of the Soviet period - blanketed the country. The initial storm having moved on to Stockholm, Tallinn airport only reopened a few hours before my 18:00 flight was due to leave Gatwick. Half a planeload of passengers were left behind on Sunday, meaning the plane, when it did finally take off, resembled a can of sardines, with enough tall blonde Nordic women to fill an ABBA video and enough Russians to fully cast Doctor Zhivago and War and Peace, and leave enough left over to re-enact 1917 - or 1940 as it was here in Estonia - all over again. I wasn't the only English person on the plane ´- there were a few crotchety businessmen moaning about lost contracts and pre-budget reports to fill a couple of seats - but at midnight, as the airport management put our flight back yet again, I decided enough was enough and, in the absence of a certain Mr V. I. Lenin, decided to stage my own revolution.

After all, there were people still waiting for the plane since Estonia declared itself independent in 1990.

There are a number of steps to declaring a revolution.

1. Form your political party. In this case it was me, a girl named Jana, a grandmother who couldn't speak English and a 3 month old baby, but never mind. The Tallinn Air Passengers' Defence Association (No Children Excepted), or TAPDANCE, was formed at 0020 hours as we realised that nothing would make airport management clear the way to reopening the Wetherspoons kitchen. (It didn't stop the infidel running dogs getting very drunk on the vouchers Gatwick provides for use in its shopping centre...sorry, departures lounge if you are delayed more than two hours, but never mind.)

2. Establish your demands. Either a night in a hotel and enough compensation to put Plan B into action (Air Baltic to Riga and train to Tallinn to get to my hotel before they gave up on me completely) or a plane to be chartered forthwith (as happened on the last occasion, when a whole planeload of us were stranded at Gatwick while a BA crew got plastered the night before Christmas Eve and forgot they had another gig that evening ... and make sure you stick to them. Reasonable compromises are permissible, but learning to be assertive rather than aggressive is a big plus. But you also have to know what is possible as well. Chartering a plane was what the police demanded of BA when the airline itself called the fuzz to deal with the irate passengers. In this case it would maybe have worked because there were people there who had had to deal with this two nights in a row, but to Air Estonia's credit they did work extremely hard to get the plane to go out and therefore we were mostly satisfied with their unofficial explanations extracted courtesy of BAA.

3. Get security onside. No use staging a riot and ending up in the cells rather than on your way. Security were fuming - after all we were in the way of essential BAA (British Airports Advertisingaccountandshoppingcentres plc) maintenance so they could shoehorn another couple of shops into what used to be Gates 20-32 - so we formed an alliance with them to make sure we didn't end up getting arrested. At this point the Passenger Revolutionaries (Menshevik fraction) ended up defecting and demanding their luggage back, so to stop the internal turmoil we had to act.

4. Establish contact and issue our demands, which in our case really only amounted to information. Servisair told us 15 minutes. We managed to get them down to 5.

5. This is the point where the revolution was averted by Servisair telling us that the plane was about 15 minutes away from landing at Gatwick. This was also the point when someone got bored and lit a cigarette. For the rest of our stay at Gatwick we had to put up with the tannoy oscillating between "The fire alarm is ringing, please evacuate the area" and "The fire alarm is ringing, but the cause has been found and there is no cause for concern". It was with great relief that we were not too far away from the gate when we were allowed to return to the main area, and the plane in the mean time landed and was cleaned, refuelled and "catered" while we waited - somewhat more patiently than before - in the departure gate.

The key to successful leadership is, in other words, patience but firm politeness. Storming the Winter Palace should only be done as a last resort.