European Air Space Closed!

It has been a rather pleasant day without the constant background noise of planes making their decent into Heathrow, usually one can hear them in the morning being quite loud and oft-times in the evening as well, so a whole day without planes is very welcome. I was in Earl’s Court tube station yesterday lunch time and heard something like ‘Due to a cloud of volcanic ash over the country, all flights into and out of the UK have been cancelled until further notice’, I was only half listening, as I was lost in my own thoughts, but that got my attention, ‘Volcanic ash’? I said to myself, ‘there are no volcanos in Britain, or anywhere near for that matter’ I thought, I then tried to place the nearest volcanos, I came up with Etna, Vesuvius and those volcanos in Iceland, but no I must have heard it wrong, no one around me seemed to have noticed, I looked up at the sky, a beautiful sunny day, no ash cloud there, then I thought it might be some tube worker having a bit of fun with us, as they sometimes do, making things up for their amusement, although that usually happens late at night or very early in the morning when, I assume, their bosses are no where abouts.

So I dismiss it as either a figment of my imagination or some tube prank, and when I pass the news agents, I look in and have a scan of the newspaper headlines and there is nothing about ash clouds or volcanos, so I stop thinking about it. Well, once I got to St Pancras, the only thing they were talking about was the ash cloud, the large TV screen had the story. What a surprise!

Well, as I have written, I am loving this respite from the constant noise of planes, luckily for us, the sun is shining, the trees are leafing and the flowers blossoming, Spring is here, the long cold Winter has left and the cherry on the top is we have a few days without those dreadful planes, life could not get any better! Well actually it could but, I’m in too cheerful a mood to have it ruined at the moment!