Damn vomcanos

Unless you've been living under a rock for the past week, you must have heard of the volcano in Iceland that's erupted and wreaked havoc, closing European airspace and grounding all flights because of dangerous ash in the air.

At first, I found it mildly amusing - in the sense of "oh wow look at that, we have all these wonderful technologies and have made huge advancements but nature trumps man every single time" - especially as I know a good number of people that are stranded worldwide and unable to complete their journeys.

Now that this vomcano business is dragging into the fifth day, that feeling of amusement is now partly mixed with a little anxiety. I've planned everything around the day I leave. My rental contract expires the morning of my flight, and I handed in my notice so my last day of work is the Friday before my Monday departure, leaving me with the weekend to do last minute frantic packing.

Don't get me wrong, I do enjoy the temping that I am doing, especially as it is for Cancer Research, a charity that I support anyway. The charity I worked on before CR was the World Wildlife Fund, which is cool I guess but even I, as a marketing assistant, didn't really buy into some of their ideas. Yeah I know it's important to save wildlife etc etc, but when you hear about some of their campaigners throwing themselves in front of a bulldozer to save the habitat of an exotic Peruvian insect from being destroyed, you have to ask yourself... really? What about people? Is that beetle going to turn up at your house with a bunch of flowers in gratitude?

The work I'm doing for CR is rewarding but pretty physically draining and I couldn't bring myself to do it for even an extra week. So if my departure ends up being pushed back I'd probably just sit at home and wait it out for a new flight, rather than do more marketing work. Well, even that wouldn't happen because my rental contract would have expired by then and my parents live abroad. So 3rd May is when I HAVE to leave.

I was at Heathrow last Sunday and the world's busiest international airport was a complete ghost town. Rows and rows of planes parked, a handful of passengers floating around in the huge Terminal 5... It was eerie in a strange way, like there was some national state of emergency and all human activity had ceased to exist.

Look at the photo of the arrivals board.  Every single flight.  Cancelled. 



The check-in area was pretty much dead, apart from a few weary passengers looking dejected and some ground staff sitting around looking bored.


So in summary, the volcano is cool in a way, the skies are actually blue rather than being filled with jet contrails, but thanks Iceland.  Nice performance, but we want our flights back.

P.S. Just as finished this post, I saw some aircraft contrails jet over London.  I hope it's a good sign.
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