If things had gone to plan this week, then I could currently be driving a rental car from Los Angeles to San Francisco by way of various national parks. This was after I’d taken photos of a friend’s wedding.
Sadly, things didn’t happen that way, and instead I’ll be back into work this week.

What I have done is watch and read a lot of coverage of Eyjafjallajökull and the fallout it’s had on European aviation. And it’s an odd story that really has been covered in a largely superficial manner.
I don’t doubt that a large number of people are struggling to get home from remote locations, and similar number of people (like me) are being put out by volcanic ash disrupting our plans.
But surely it is a lot bigger than a few people who aren’t able to cope too well by themselves abroad. There are industries and businesses that are suffering. We’ve heard that some fruit and vegetables are going to disappear from supermarket shelves pretty soon. We’re so used to eating out of season food, we barely notice the country of origin. And your local florist’s selection is likely to be cut back as all those Kenyan grown flowers stop arriving.
News has to personalise everything, sometimes missing out on the bigger picture. We have little enough knowledge of what kinds of products are regularly air-freighted around the globe. And they’re also having difficulty juggling this story with the election coverage.
Instead we see families in Belgian hotel rooms moaning that their “holiday of a lifetime” (which they’d had – they got diverted on the way home), which they’d saved for a year for (so that’ll be their annual holiday then), was spoilt because they have no nouse and can’t even work out how to get themselves to a ferry port. Instead they were being fleeced by some opportunitist hiring a coach. It might also be worth mentioning that there are other rail services that serve ports apart from Eurostar. Calais is busy, but why not try somewhere like the Hook of Holland, Dieppe, Le Havre or Cherbourg?

It’ll be interesting to learn how long these flight bans stay in place. We’re hearing that various test aircraft have travelled safely, but this volcano is not going to stop spewing out lava anytime soon and could remain active for another two years. In the meantime there’s the small matter of Katla, a much bigger nearby volcano that has also erupted the last three times that Eyjafjallajökull erupted.
Do you want to be the test passenger that heads into the skies and hopes that the ash doesn’t interfere with modern jet engines?

(No – this isn’t even remotely relevant to the above piece).