It takes your breath away, Mount Eyjafjallajokull not usually the stately five-mile-high tear but the tellurian effect. It reminds us of the reckless, pretentious human bent to hang all the eggs in one basket. Oil, electricity, banking, antibiotics, silicon chips, the Pill, mobile phones, the internet, air transport at your convenience a shining invention dawns, we rush towards dependency and afterwards tilt in shock if it threatens to be taken away.
It is a rather endearing characteristic, since it shows that we have confidence and goal and do not of course lend towards to Luddism. But it might do us good to have the trickery in isolation for a couple of days from time to time. Make us appreciate it all the more.
The airspace lockdown over Britain and most of Europe, right away entering the fifth treacherous day, has goods trimming from comic, around rather annoying, to really worrying and near-tragic.
Particular magnetism for the bad farmers in the tropics whose ripened offspring rots in the fields since it cannot fly to abounding Europe, additionally to invalids and to those available critical remedy or stranded but it. Economic disasters dawn too, for airlines and others. There are honestly fearful travellers stranded from Mumbai to Moscow, but most income and mostly with confused children, who right away know that airline bookings meant that, even when the black clouded cover does blow away, it might be subsequent month prior to they get seats. A family of my own kin is fretting in New Zealand as I write, with jobs watchful behind home and young kids disturbed about school. No, the hardships are not to be taken lightly.
On the alternative hand, it is bona fide to have a short hee-haw at those self-importantly moneyed media and promissory note sorts stranded in the Maldives and forced to teleconference on Skype, to shake up your head at the thought of John Cleese struggling behind from Norway around a 3,300 taxi tour from Oslo to Brussels, and at the pinstriped chaps in Dunkirk shopping pinkish kiddie bicycles to explain packet spaces directed towards for cyclists only.
Raise an eyebrow at the report that the Duchess of Cornwall was incompetent to get to London to pointer a upraise book for President Kaczynski of Poland because she was in, er, Scotland. That the London Marathons organisers are anxious since the complete chosen margin of athletes is abroad usually creates you instruct that the Channel had a open feet tunnel, so that they could all pound by it together by approach of practice.
The resisting reply of dual gung-ho radio celebrities is instructive, too. Dan Snow is mustering a Dunkirk-style swift of speedboats to rescue holidaymakers from Europe; James May, of the simpleton petrolhead BBC programme Top Gear, has been criticised by the Icelandic military for perplexing to expostulate up the lava upsurge in a superjeep. His tyres held fire. You confirm that indication of brave machismo to set prior to your sons.
From magnetism to schadenfreude, responses decrease in ashy, hazed confusion: this thing is roughly as well huge to take in. The divine reply is to chunter on about the Majesty of Nature and slip seamlessly in to eco-preaching; OK, take that as read. What I have been doing, with due respect to those whose pang is over annoyance, is to have a list of the china linings. If happiness offends you, spin true to the election pages. I will not take offence.
The initial calm thoughtfulness is that, for once, there is nobody to blame. Volcanoes have no avocation towards us, and the breeze bloweth where it listeth. This is nobodys fault. Social services are not implicated. Even Tony Blair is not responsible. There need be no costly inquiry: Lord Hutton can stand down. Better still, no planes have depressed out of the sky, since the right thing was finished in fast enforcing the grounding, and lessons were remembered from progressing events such as the 1982 Mount Galunggung near-disaster when the pilot, Eric Moody, kept his head with 4 stopped engines.
Other viewable benefits are philosophical. We have learnt some-more about aviation and what it does to us how easily we take the benefits for postulated and how quiescent we are to the pollutions. Richmond Park is still again; walkers in Sussex see up to a wordless sky free of Gatwick vapour-trails and inhale calm.
We have additionally been forced to confess that, for all the smoothing and balmy of the traveller industry, it isnt a small world, or a homogenised one. Ask those holidaymakers entrance home from Thailand, immured right away in a Moscow airport road house but visas or a word of Russian, unexpected realising what it is to be far from home between strangers who are not legal legal legal holiday reps.
These lessons are hard, but they are not useless. We need reminding. We have learnt alternative things too: similar to usually how weaselly are legal legal legal holiday word companies, how handicapped their assurances and far-reaching their loopholes. We shall read the small imitation from right away on. We have additionally been reminded that we live on an island maybe the Merchant Marine and the Royal Navy could transparent their throats and remind us once some-more that we positively need ships and regularly will, and that 95 per cent of all we make use of arrives by sea anyway.
What else? Well, the internet has come of age: unfettered by volcanic ash, the tweets and blogs and teleconferences and Skype-chats camber the globe, researching options and calming family groups and handling companies and transferring money. Maybe a little globetrotting commercial operation sorts and compulsive serial holidaymakers will right away realize that passed hours outlayed in airports are often a rubbish of life.
One alternative thing to conclude is that, similar to all healthy disruptions, this is an eventuality to examination human flexibility, skill and goodwill.
So young kids might be late behind for exams? Let the examination play work out a approach to make it OK. So tourists are stranded in the building world, using out of money and flourishing fearful as they deposit out of the holiday-nannying bubble? Let them sense how inexhaustible and kind the typical adults of their legal legal legal holiday paradise can be.
There will be thousands of low in isolation sadnesses in this eventuality reunions and funerals missed, last meetings unfit but there will additionally be a host of new human connections, a clouded cover of thankfulness and a flowering in adversity. I hope, as you do, that the breeze shifts and Mount Unpronounceable calms down. But duration we can usually wonder at and do what human beings have regularly had to do adapt.
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