Day 3 Under the Ash Cloud

It's a lovely sunny day here under the ash. Apparently you cannot get a seat on Eurostar for love or money at the moment and the ferries are not accepting any new foot passengers. You can probably still get here by swimming though, or by chartering a piston engined aircraft (I just saw one ambling overhead). Beyond that, I propose remaining this island to "The Lost Kingdom of Great Britain". It's got a nice ring to it!

Also posted at http://auntysarah.dreamwidth.org/234375.html - you can comment here or there.

Agoraphobia

This is an actual photograph of the sky today over Cambridge. I took it with my iPhone (no, I don't know if it's in focus or not). Today is the hottest day this year so far - it feels more like summer than spring. There are no clouds in the sky at all.

Cambridge is right under the northern edge of the London Terminal Manoeuvring Area - one of the most complex and busiest pieces of controlled airspace in the world. It's a large area covering London and much of the south east, from which "legs" drop down to Earth, most notably at London's main airports - Heathrow, Gatwick, Stansted and London City. It's normally crawling with planes. This means that on a clear day in Cambridge, the sky would normally contain several contrails.

Today there are none. Apart from the Sun, the sky is a featureless blue void. I was out canvassing this morning, and I was actually finding this really unnerving. I kept getting this feeling of void around me, as if I was expecting to have a visual reference point in the corner of my vision in the sky - something I could focus on occasionally, at least subconsciously, but nothing was there.

At times it felt like I could fall up into the sky and vanish in that blue void of nothing. There's a brilliant bit in one of Ian M Banks Culture short stories which mentions that Culture citizens, used to living on orbitals where there is no horizon (because the surface is concave rather than convex) get agoraphobic when they find themselves on a planet - they feel like they're going to fall off.

Today I feel a bit like that, and it's freaking me out quite a lot. Can we have just a couple of little clouds, please?

Also posted at http://auntysarah.dreamwidth.org/234504.html - you can comment here or there.