There used to be a small US airline called Piedmont and my friend Gray called it the Puddle jumper. Or hopper. Not only were they short distance flights, their small aircraft had propellers. I'm reminded of it now, as I have hopped across the Irish Sea in a small plane with propellers, then early this morning we crossed the English Channel or La Manche as those on the other side call it.
Such a good feeling, a remembered pleasure, as the plane made contact with French soil, or tarmac, as we landed, very smoothly I have to say. I had forgotten how good it feels being in France. Even if it’s only at the airport it still feels like France.
The young woman serving in the Carlton hotel restaurant last night said she had just sat an exam. She's a student. What subject? I ask. Sports media. When she finishes she'd like a job in Germany or USA or England. I ask if they are particularly busy this evening. Yes she says, I was walking with my friends after the exam and it was so windy I said I bet we'll be busy tonight, there will be lots of people sent here from the airline because this weather will delay flights and people will miss their connections, there will be a stream of discomfited passengers.
But she didn't say discomfited, that’s my word. She was reassuring and friendly as were all the reception staff who probably specialise in dealing with morose or annoyed or even ill tempered passengers manqué, trailing their baggage and their disrupted plans, but probably mostly looking vague or slightly absent, looking around them and waiting to be told what to do.
And they will be. They will be hugely accommodated and fed, at the airline's expense. Because, well, the reason for delay in flights, just as the Irish student predicted, was high winds. But I think it was trickster Mercury shaking his coat of clouds or flicking his winged sandals to shake up the stratosphere a little, get those winds hurrying across the skies as if they had a vital rendezvous which they do, well of course they do, it's just that they didn't tell us about it.
So many everyday miracles, regular tricks and wizardry and sleights of hand. Especially when landing and taking off. On a atterré. Returned to earth. On a décollé. We have unstuck from our usual close connection with the earth. We are weightless, we have taken off, we are between earth and deep space we are moving at speed between our beloved solid ground and the home of stars beyond gravity, and that is why they twinkle so magnificently, shivering with curiosity, watching us hopping over ponds and oceans somewhere at least in my case, between believing and not believing that I am really in the air above earth, that this is really happening. It has been a little dream like for some time.
Some of us flit about the earth in these extraordinary silver cigar shaped machines and others look up to machines in the sky which drop bombs on them.
Early this morning I was waiting in quite a long line for coffee, before boarding my first flight. I needed a coffee and I was grateful that there was a café serving coffee at 5.30 in the morning. It took a while though, this was no Starbucks with lots of baristas, there was only one young woman, to serve everyone. A family of Americans is behind me. The teenage girl says to her father, why is there such a queue? They've just opened, he says. Why didn't they open earlier? she asks. I mean what if I had flight at 3 am and I needed, she pauses, a service? Her father does not reply at least not audibly. I marvel meanwhile at a generation who assumes that one should get whatever one wants, at any time. At least in an airport. But they have come to expect that, because mostly that's how it is. And, if there are winds and storms, floods and volcanic eruptions, if there are snow storms and ice storms, dust storms and sand storms, your airline will put you up, will find another flight for you, will re-book you, will feed you, will ensure you can get to your accommodation, can get back to the airport, can get on to your new flight.
And for all this too, I feel immense gratitude: we have come to expect that airlines are really stand ins for the divine powers of weather and serendipity and for those acts of God which no one can predict and even if you could, you would be powerless to prevent their effects on our fragile systems, our delicate metal tubes buffeted by the air streams that flow around our planet. The effects ranging from slowing down the transport tubes (like those vacuum canisters that used to travel around a connecting network of tubes, a kind of delivery service bringing mail, within a city, or receipts, within a large department store, or even an underground service of trains, shuttling people from one part of the city to another) from slowing them down to bringing them to a complete standstill, to grounding them you could say, preventing any more unsticking from the ground, leaving one in that oh so familiar relationship to earth, your reference point, the place you return to, even if you do briefly manage to lift your feet from the ground it is always always with a view to coming back down.
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