WHILE thousands were left stranded thanks to the British Airways bank holiday computer bug, one stranded Oxford lecturer set to give a talk in Madrid decided to make the most of a bad situation.

Dr Anders Sandberg, 44, of the philosophy department at Oxford University had to give his lecture – ‘reviewing the methods of slowing ageing’ in front of hundreds of bemused passengers at lounge A1 of Heathrow’s Terminal 5 on Saturday afternoon.

He was due to catch a flight to Madrid to give his lecture in front of students at the Institute of Business Studies but thanks to the technical glitch which grounded flights and left thousands stranded he decided that his laptop would have to do.

The Summertown resident told Oxford Mail: “My dad worked for a Scandinavian airline and so when I was younger my time was spent waiting at airports. So I took a quite phlegmatic approach to it.

“It was probably the first time anybody has given a lecture at a departure gate. Maybe we should have them more often.”

He said that he first knew something was wrong while he was waiting for his flight that morning and the gate numbers all slowly began to change.

He said: “There was this moment when the gate numbers one by one started to go out. I realised then that I would not be making it to Madrid in time to give the lecture.

“So I thought OK I am really getting delayed here and it was obvious that even if the problem was fixed I was still not going to be able to make it. And then I decided that I would just have to do it from here.

“People were wondering what was going on when I started and were wondering what was I talking about with this lecture, talking about stem cells and ageing.

“It must have looked quite weird.”

The glitch which caused travel chaos and is now fixed was caused by a ‘power supply issue’ according to the airline. All of the check-in and operational systems at BA were affected by it.