A PPL flies into Birmingham

The press release from Birmingham airport said ‘in order to help with our 70th birthday celebrations and the arrival of the Airbus A380, pilots of classic aircraft are invited to apply to fly into the airport on September 9th’.
Well, I thought, the AA5 I sometimes fly is not exactly a classic (some of the instruments might be) but it’s worth a try. So I emailed the airport and eventually a reply came back saying that as I was the only AA5 pilot to request a slot I was in!
So it was that on the 9th September I took off from Turweston together with my flying partner John Blake and my wife Evelyn en route to Birmingham. Everything was looking good, visibility was excellent, no rain forecast and there was a bright blue sky.
On changing to Birmingham approach frequency, however, doubts began to set in. I could hear inbound light aircraft being asked to orbit all over the place to allow the normal commercial aircraft to take off and land. Hmm, I thought, what’s the best way to handle this? I set up an orbit at Gaydon, called Birmingham with my details, and indicated that I was orbiting. The plan worked as I hoped when Birmingham gave me a straight-in approach to runway 15. Everything was going well, I could see the runway clearly and was on a long final. The next call from approach control was that I was number four to land, which perturbed me somewhat as I reckoned I would land in about a minute and I couldn’t see the other three aircraft!
Being used to landing on relatively short runways (around 900 metres) the optical illusion of Birmingham (2600 metres) was that I was much closer than I thought.
On short final, with another light aircraft taking its time over vacating the runway, I was beginning to think this was going wrong when the controller told the aircraft to ‘expedite your exit’. This he did, just in time, and we were down at Birmingham airport!