Living under the cloud

This is the first day since the eruption that it’s been truly overcast here. I know it seems a bit odd after seeing animated maps of great clouds contaminating the British Isles every night on the news and watching the dust spread from shore to shore. There may have been a slight haze to the blue in the sky before today, but the the little bits that have been disrupting so many people’s lives (and giving peace and quiet to those near major airports here) is invisible to most of us on the ground.

My parents found it a bit hard to believe that we couldn’t see it. I don’t even think we’ve had the dust layer that people have reported finding on their things. Sure, I wiped a bunch of dirt off our lawn furniture today, but I think that was just your average gunk and not plutonic in origin. It didn’t smell like burning Vikings or anything.

We’re lucky though. We had talked about flying to the States for Easter, but money is just a bit too tight right now. Mr Moggs had planned to take an extra week off, which would mean that he would have been due back today. Which, of course, means we’d probably be stranded somewhere not in the UK right now trying to make some mad cap trip back home via a boat, three planes, an overly long taxi ride, a ferry, and several trains. Sometimes having an irrational fear of flying which makes me jump at any excuse to avoid trips involving jets or planes really isn’t as bad as it sounds.

I do hope for a lot of peoples’ sakes the eruption calms down and flights can resume. It’s one thing to figure out how to get food into the country via alternate routes. It’s something entirely different to figure out how to get things like transplant organs and tissues from the mainland in time. I guess another silver lining to this is that we may reassess food and perishable good supplies and storage lest we be caught by surprise from an even bigger disaster.

For now, I just hope that the stranded can get home and that the airspace clears. But I secretly like the quiet, and I can help feeling snug and safe on my island. This truly is an island country, and it’s hard to ever forget it even if you rarely see the ocean.

I remember seeing a jet flying on the first day they grounded the flights. I was scared that it was headed for a crash due to the ash, but it seemed to be flying relatively low. I didn’t think at the time that it would be the last one I’d see for a while. I wonder how long until we see another.