The bus station at Heathrow Terminal Five is not a happy place to be late at night for travellers bound for Oxford because there are, in two words, no buses.

Yes, we’re back once more on a transport theme after last week’s jeremiads on car parking and London Underground ticketing, which appeared to achieve some popularity with readers to judge by traffic on The Oxford Times website.

This time, though, my concern is with buses, taxis and planes.

Planes first.

In making plans for a holiday in Greece, we opted to travel back last Sunday on the final British Airways flight of the day from Athens. Timings were tight, but we reckoned there would be at least an hour from touch-down to the bus station for the last Airline service home at 11.10pm.

That this might have been a little optimistic was evident when we reached the BA bag drop desk at Athens’s Elepthenios Venizelos airport and learned of a 20-minute delay.

In the event, take-off was half an hour later than scheduled, chiefly owing to the length of time it took to board the plane. (When will BA outlaw those huge pieces of wheelable ‘hand luggage’ that fill the overhead lockers before many of the passengers are on board?) A head wind most of the way home meant the lost time could not be recovered.

But what really finished us was being brought to a halt a few yards from the landing gate at Heathrow.

The captain explained that equipment that controls the aircraft’s final approach was suddenly not working and that we required the services of one of those chaps waving what look like giant fly-swatters. It took one 20 minutes to arrive.

Next we discovered (wouldn’t you just know it?) that we were at one of the satellite gates, about as far as you can get from baggage collect and the rest. And Rosemarie was still limping from a sprained ankle.

At passport control all five machines for dealing with e-passports, such as we proudly flourished for the first time, were out of use.

The other desks, though, in this often-complained-of part of the airport, speedily dealt with the crowds. Well done!

It was 11.15pm when we finally cleared customs.

This was five minutes after the last Airline service called at Terminal Five, as we knew from the 16-page timetable booklet we had picked up on the outward journey. Now we should have to go to the Central Bus Station on the other side of the airport, from which later services were operating, the next at five minutes past midnight.

But how to get there? None of the 16 pages of the timetable told us, which seemed a strange omission. I remembered from previous trips that information was given at the bus stop, so we made our way there.

We discovered that until 11.30pm we should travel by the Heathrow Express train. Infuriatingly, it was now too late to do this, though it would have been perfectly possible if this advice had been given in the timetable.

After 11.30pm, the Central Bus Station was to be reached on an N9 service from bay seven (actually it’s bay six), with the first running at 11.55pm and a journey time of about 10 minutes.

Now I wonder if anybody at Oxford Bus Company has done the math, as the Americans say, and worked out that the N9 reaches the Central Bus Station at precisely the time that the Oxford service leaves, or has left, with the next not due till 1.50am.

We clearly needed a taxi, a long rank of which stood opposite. Astonishingly, their drivers refused to take us, saying there was nowhere to stop at the bus station.

This smelt to me like a racket, with the cabbies out for more lucrative fares. The Heathrow authorities should look into this, pronto.

Anyway, all this ends sort of happily. The N9 came on time, the 10-minute run followed as predicted, and happily the Airline coach running in from Gatwick was a bit late.

So we were home in bed at a time when we could easily have still been stuck in a deserted bus station. A close shave.