Recently, I had the worst security experience ever at MAN. There were staff screaming instructions at the queues of passengers - their exact words were remove anything bigger than a mobile phone and put it in a tray. There was no mention of removing cables, cameras or everything with a battery.

The staff doing the secondary searches then proceeded to yell at everybody who had left their phones and smaller items in their bags. I was also yelled at for having my cables all in one place in my bag - neatly coiled and in a pouch, then yelled at for having a couple more cables because they weren't in the same place. Everything was removed from my bag and slammed back in, including a very small camera, accompanied by a stream of unpleasant remarks. This was after I'd been through the metal detector, then the body scanner, an extremely thorough manual search, and had my shoes removed and taken to be scanned. It took 45 minutes for me to get through security - I had no metal in or on my person, I was wearing the same clothes and carrying the same items in the same way that has always me trouble free at security in other airports, but nothing is ever good enough at Manchester. They always include a diatribe about having multiple layers of stuff packed in a bag - is there any other way to pack?

I am one of those middle aged / older ladies mentioned by Barnaby100, and this experience was so bad that it did reduce me to tears.