Actually the column should probably be retitled "view from 35,000 feet" this week as I've spent a lot of my time hopping on various planes. I think I've been over and back to the UK more often since the beginning of this year than I ever was when I used to deal with people in the City which is pretty mind-blowing. I've been weighing up the relative merits of the different London airports again as I've used almost all of them in the last week (Gatwick is next week). For punctuality, Ryanair to Luton is as good as it claims in its ads (92 per cent of flights on time apparently) but the Stansted route is still awful despite its punctuality claims of around 80 per cent - especially as it doesn't bother to tell you that the flight is actually delayed, it just leaves you sitting there wondering if you've time to get another coffee or not.

I'm not so sure about this policy of choosing your seat when you get on the plane either, since it leads to insane scrums as people jostle for seats and must surely delay departure while forlorn passengers wander up and down the aisle with their oversized cabin luggage looking for the last couple of available seats.

British Midland delayed a flight to Heathrow by an hour and then freaked out when I used my mobile phone in the executive lounge to tell the people I was meeting that I would be late. (This was because I used it in a part of the room that was designated a mobile-free zone. I was ashamed of myself when I realised this, being in favour of mobile-free zones myself, but peeved too, since the non-mobile-free zone was jammed with people all phoning up to say that their BM flight had been delayed. The return leg (Aer Lingus) was delayed by nearly two hours, but it allowed us to phone from wherever we liked in the lounge (thank heavens for the lounge in Heathrow because the waiting areas in that tubular monstrosity are an absolute disgrace - Heathrow has to be the worst airport in the world from which to fly to Dublin).

Amid the trips to and from London was one to Alicante in Spain (Monarch airlines, also from Luton, on time both ways and a great service). The east coast of Spain now has more cranes than the IFSC, since there is a construction boom going on at the moment led by demand for holiday or retirement homes in the sun. Some of them are lovely, some not so nice, but they're going up even quicker than the apartment blocks on the Howth Road.

Not as expensive, though, as I don't think any country (except Japan) has ever or will ever experience the kind of boom we've had here. But confidence in the Spanish economy is high, even with inflation there picking up (if you recall, the European Central Bank admonished it at the same time as us for increased inflation). The shops, bars and restaurants all have signs telling you that they need assistants, waiters and waitresses, there are lots of new cars and the roads have improved beyond all recognition.

Confidence is such an ephemeral concept and yet so important to an economy.

It's here, it's in Spain, but despite the strength of sterling it's not there to the same extent in the UK. Even with house prices increasing (and they're calling it a boom while here it would be just a blip) and the fact that earnings growth is at 6 per cent (much higher than the Bank of England's target levels of 4.5 per cent), people are still not hugely confident about their jobs and their future.

While in Spain I was watching Sky News and every day the lead story seemed to be about the sale of Rover. It was interesting to see how sales of Rover cars doubled in the month since BMW announced that it was selling the group (13.5 per cent of the market and over 22,000 cars) and how much BMW sales slumped in the intervening period (2 per cent of the market and just under 3,500 cars).

The whole thing has really been a fiasco for BMW, proving that management can get it wrong in any company, no matter how successful it has been in the past. But all of the nationalistic hype about various British bids for the group doesn't disguise the fact that Rover has never sold enough cars either in the UK or in Europe to remain profitable. One month doesn't add up to a whole year's sales and I'm pretty certain that whoever buys the group will end up facing almost exactly the same problems as BMW did. It's an odd coincidence of events, though, that has the London Stock Exchange and the Deutsche Borse finally agreeing on a merger at the same time as there is so much angst about BMW and Rover. Although it's not surprising that there's a dispute about whether British shares are to be quoted in sterling or euros, I was surprised there wasn't a furore about the euro coming in by the back door.

Naturally, Europeans are now used to dealing in euros for share transactions, but there's a mental readjustment to be made for the British in deciding to quote British companies in euros. And, of course, British pension funds are right to be concerned that they will have a mismatch between their liabilities and their assets, since they'll still be paying out pensions in sterling.

Meanwhile, hanging around the bars and cafes of London's airports, it's chilling to realise that the cup of coffee for £1.30 has actually cost £1.75. And that the chocolate doughnut for 99p is £1.32. And that they're getting more expensive by the minute. Almost enough to make you start that diet after all!