A Banana Split Flight Delay Blog

Hanover Airport 7th October 2011, 8p.m.

I have been in this airport for four hours now. I have read most of my book and my two New Scientist magazines. Nobody of any note is visible on the whole concourse, so there is nothing much to look at.
Nothing for it then but to get out my laptop and do the nerdy businessman thing whilst keeping an eye on the monitors for updates.
Of course, I hope I don't look like the nerdy businessman, having uncomfortably changed out of my suit in the salubrious surroundings of a toilet cubicle whilst the Vietnamese cleaning lady hammered on the door telling me in broken German that she really needed to clean the toilet now.

So, now, suit stowed and clad in my cerise shirt with a big collar with a visible floral backing, I make my way to the Mövenpick restaurant for a good feed. I notice my reflection as I pass a mirror and it occurs to me this shirt is perhaps a little camp after all. I cough in a gruff manner designed to emphasise my secure heterosexual orientation, such is my desire not to give the wrong impression. It fails and I break into a hacking wheezing cough because I have had a chest infection for two weeks which refuses to go away.

The Mövenpick is an atmospheric restaurant, despite its Swiss origins. A huge window opens up onto the runway and the ambience is reinforced by the sight of airport machinery and aeroplanes standing somewhat stoically under orange light in the Film Noir twilight rain.

I order a Hefe Weizenbier and a smoked salmon rosti. It all arrives gratifingly quickly as one would expect from such an efficent restaurant. The Rosti has a huge dollop of rather mild and extremely tasy horseradish lying artistically on top. I don't usually like horseradish so, experimentally, I scoop some up onto a piece of smoked salmon. It is utterly delicious, so next time, I add a forkful of rosti and this is even better.

The beer calls to me tantalisingly and I take a good long draught. After the horse radish, the weizenbier takes on a distinctive vanilla aspect that I had hitherto never noticed in a drink of its ilk. This is, I remark to myself, a rather opulent and enjoyable feast, and given the day I have had, I think I deserve every bit of it.

A rosti is a strange dish. It is apparently grated potato, made into a kind of pancake and shallow fried in butter. Served with smoked salmon, it is rather rich, but I manage. It reminds me vaguely of the refried chips we had once on a camping trip when I was a kid, left over from the night before and fried in the breakfast bacon fat. Just the thing for a growing lad! Alas, I cannot see my dinner in this light due to my failing eyesight, so I have to put on my reading glasses, which brings the food into a somehow surreal and rather too sharp focus.

There are two loudly laughing German ladies in front of me in riding jodhpurs. They keep getting up to do various things, such as ferret about in handbags, throughout their meal, which seems strange to me as I have not have occasion to move for some time and after that main course, it is doubtful I even could.
I wonder momentarily if they rode to the airport on horses. Perhaps, next to the Hertz and Avis vehicle returns there are two palominos tethered to a post whilst an attendent examines every square centimetre for a scratch or dent in order to extract extortionate and disproportionate payment for barely visible damage.
Jodhpurs on the right form can stop a man in his tracks. They can hug a bottom and emphasise glorious feminine curves with mesmerising effect. Not so these. They are slightly too big for the bottoms they contain and a little baggy in the crotch. And they are brown, purple and pink check with white arse-padding. It seems a strange choice of garment to be travelling in on a plane. Two enormous ice-creams arrive and are added eagerly to the bottom girth in only a few minutes.

Outside in the rainy gloom, almost dark now, a plane takes of. It is a small jet, possibly an Embraer or similar. Take-off always seems miraculous to me, even now. I have worked on aeroplanes, I understand the physics very clearly and yet here is several dozen tons of metal leaving the ground rapidly with no visible means of support. A propellor implies motive power, as a wheel rotating on a car does. You can feel the notion of thrust from just looking at them. But a jet jut throws out gasses and this seems somehow too arcane to propel an object to thousands of feet in the sky.

My banana split arrives. It is positively sinful in its indulgence. A small pot of chocolate sauce is perched on the tray, for pouring over the ice-cream. I pour it all and scrape the remainder from the tiny jug with my finger, catching the eye of the waitress who twinkles a knowing smile at me as if to say "Everyone does that but its still cute".

It occurs to me that the Swiss are notoriously good at chocolate and I ponder briefly when in their history, relative to clockmaking, they aquired this specialisation. I know they have a lot of cows and alpine meadows give rich milk, but cocoa beans come from a very long way from Switzerland, whereas metalwork has been going on there for a very long time.
Nevertheless, I am grateful to whoever brought the idea to them as the sauce is utterly gorgeous.
Spent, my ice-cream devoured, I slump back into my chair, gesticulating feebly to the waitress for the bill with an air scribble. Mostly people don't use pens any more now that chip and pin cards are predominant, but since I am forced to use American Express by my employer and I refuse a PIN for it because I am a cantankerous luddite, I still have to sign a bill. This pleases me as it is one of the few times in these modern days that I ever use a pen.

Sated, I head out into the concourse of the airport, just in time to hear the announcement that my flight is now delayed an hour to ten o'clock.
The joy of international business travel...

post script: We eventually took off at 11:30 p.m and I got home at 2 a.m. on the Saturday morning.

Cultivate Serendipitous Connections

As so often, I stare at the screen and the widget stares back. Less intimidating than a blank piece of paper, its white space nevertheless conveys the sense of expectation to be filled with something.
As a piece of A4, ruled with a margin and faint blue lines is less forbidding than a truly blank sheet bearing no marks or implication of structure, the widget's friendly buttons for the addition of pictures, links or videos, hint at some kind of encouragement to put one's thoughts in a coherent manner within the space indicated. Once begun, the words come more easily, the space no longer being empty and the fear of despoiling it largely overcome.

And so, I wonder briefly why such spaces exist anyway. Why, all over the world, are people tapping away their days, writing thoughts profound or inconsequential, into small white spaces on a computer screen? Is it a form of narcissism? Possibly. Hypergraphia? Certainly words and concepts announce themselves to me, and hence compel me to release them upon a largely indifferent world. Perhaps the motivation does not bear too much scrutiny. Maybe we should just let the thoughts coalesce into words and see what happens.
Personally, it balances me to write here. The words I wield are tools which are refined through use, but also they are the currency of our internal dialogues and any improvement in our language and articulation must surely provide some commensurate improvement in the quality of our thinking. And goodness knows I need that!

A book I flicked through, by an actual writer, about the process and craft of creative writing, suggested we should "cultivate serendipitous connections". I think he had a different meaning in mind to the one I took from it, but isn't that my own connection? I take it to mean exchanging ideas with people who see things differently to myself. People. Yes, the people make the party, so to speak. In a roundabout way, I shall arrive at my thoughts on this, mainly because, until I have written them down, I won't really know what they are. Only that there are many and I need to explain this to myself on this rather difficult of days.

Today, I find myself beset with a heavy sadness with which I do not want to infect the world. Other peoples' moods are their concern and perhaps it is arrogant of me to think I have any effect on them whatsoever. However, the human condition does contain a large component of empathy (in apparently 98% of people anyway) so I hope my melancholy is not too contagious.

I have to go to a funeral in a little over an hour; a funeral of one taken very young as he was just taking his first steps to an independent life as an adult in the world. I shall not dwell on the details, only that he was as talented and magnificent a young man as one could ever hope to meet and that he succumbed after a long illness which I consider a very unjust stroke of fate. It goes without saying that this is a tragedy for all who knew him and also for the world which, given his particular gifts, would surely have benefited from his participation in it.

I remark to myself how I came to know him, through my son's Greenpower Racing team. Such a tightly-knit and wonderful group of kids working together to make and race an electric racing car, with parental help and signficant, very enjoyable, social activities. It was one of those activities that brought together unlikely alliances of people who would otherwise never have met. As such, it was a very fertile and productive environment that benefited us all, I think, in ways both obvious and oblique.

And I recollect all the places I have been where I have met people who, in other times, in other ages, I would have had no opportunity to know. All that we are derives from what we begin with and the subsequent unfolding narratives of our lives. How people and events act upon us to produce who we are right now is unfathomably complex, weaving, in some cases, a rich tracery of intricate threads.

Other places I have met people are virtual. They may not exist in any physical geography, but the connections I have made there exist like golden threads through actual space, the kind an atlas can signify. These threads connect me, in my mind to places all over this globe, to people who have opened up my understanding of the world, brought perspectives I could not have otherwise had any conception of, shown me ideas I had not even suspected existed.
These people close and distant, are points on my spatial map of humanity. It makes the world somehow more accessible and the ideas in it available in a way they weren't when I lived in a small village whose only link to beyond the visible horizon was the news, the papers and the library in the next town.
I feel the richer for these threads.

Some of those virtual spaces I have left. Some forums, for various reasons, I have closed my accounts on, shut down my presence. Some had passed on, falling into disrepair and neglect, some I left for different reasons. But in my head, the map of the world is still populated by pins with small flags on, and though some of the threads may be now indistinct and sagging, the influence upon me as a person will remain.

People come and go in your life, through consequence, location and ultimately death. But whilst we are here, it's the other people who we surround ourselves with, with whom we correspond and share ideas, they are the ones who make us to some large extent what we are. And I am grateful to all of those who have left their mark upon this personality that I inhabit, good and bad, for surely both had some value. The people really do make the party.

In just over an hour, I will attend a funeral for one much younger than me. And it is deeply sad for all involved, but better he lived a short life and showed an example to some, which he so surely did, than never have lived at all. He passed by my aquaintance and left a mark. A good one.

Rest in Peace Alex. I am glad to have known you.

Seventh Floor

Its a strange reminder about how how a position can change perspectives. Yet again I am in that esteemed establishment, the Arosa hotel in Paderborn. This flying visit was requested a while ago but I have been reluctant to make the journey. This time, I am in the lofty heights of the seventh floor where I can see all of the town stretched out below me, as so often before. Only this time, the view is further and I can see more of the countryside beyond the grey conurbation.
I suppose I was aware of the surrounding countryside before. I just never gave it any thought. It is not really unlike the countryside at home except that perhaps the fields are a little more regular in shape. I have no idea whether there was an equivalent of the Enclosures Act in these parts.

So, once again, I am struck by the rapidity with which I am suddenly elsewhere. And after my rather unsociable Friday evening flight at 9 p.m. this evening, I shall undoubtedly be disorientated by the discovery that I am home again, without seemingly noticing the intervening process of transition. I have long since given up attempting to assimilate the amount of information that such a journey presents to my eyes and ultimately my mind: There is just too much of it and to attemt to do so just results in mild motion sickness.

But it does make me think very carefully about how rapidly situations change. That which seemed unthinkable can in moments become the only choice of action. Once I was berated for my table manners by a well-meaning if misguided soul, on the grounds they would let me down if I ever had to represent my company at dinner with customers. "Yeah, like that is ever going to happen!" I thought.

Lately, there have been too many sudden requirements for a change in perspective. There have and continue to be too may funerals for my liking too. Some of them are rather poignant, like the team mate of my son who, at 20, succumbed last week to cancer. We are all aware of the pointlessness of railing at Fate and the unfolding of the Universe, but this was a particularly bitter loss for anyone who knew him. The words of countless parents and teachers over the generations never rang truer: "No, Life isn't fair!"

And so, looking out from this window so high up, and knowing my vantage point will soon change again, I am suddenly unsettled. Certainties seem elusive and change seems to be constant. And in this we have to decide what to take with us and where to stand for the next transition.

My life has changed this week. Some things have been made clear to me about the attitude of how I approach life. I need to make some changes if I am to retain my sanity and that which I value. Deaths tend to do that to one, don't they? As does standing in a high place and looking out at the workings of humanity, nestled in a landscape.

Alas, I have a presentation to write and fifteen minutes in which to do it. So I must leave this here. It was, in its way, my own attempt to rationalise the processes that are happening in my head. It is not necessary that anyone actually read it, only, for the sake of rigour, that I feel someone could. That's hard to explain, but should you have struggled heroically this far, i am certain you know what I mean.

And now to get down to the nitty gritty of everyday life and to leave all matters whimsical in their proper place. Corporate head on, suit on, smile affixed.

More anon.

A Job Well Done

My son left home yesterday. We took him, and a van full of his belongings, to his university lodgings, deposited him and his stuff and without further ceremony, left him to his own devices in this strange new city. His lip quivered barely perceptively as we headed back to the van, but hugs and meaningful lingering smiles over, it was time to depart.

I remember how this felt, at least from my own perspective. I was left in a town much less attractive and frankly hated most of my first year. But the loneliness and abandonment one feels is to some extent outweighed, or at least balanced by the sense of excitement that the novel situation, with all its new people and hitherto unimagined possibilities offered. I am sure he will have a great time. All he has to do is avoid fighting with the sailors and be careful not to get drunk and fall in the harbour. Both of these, I confess, have haunted unreasonably those hours when night is darkest and I should have been sleeping. When the night is dark and the world is asleep, you alone are left there with your fears. Often they are ridiculous fears that in the light of day, you would dismiss with a mental brush of the hand. But at night, realism abandons you and all possibilities seem likely and terrifying.
Well, I have come to terms with those. I feel the lad has been prepared as well as we could possibly have managed. I am confident he has all the skills he needs to survive alone, or can develop them based upon his innate character and existing knowledge. My wobbliness subsides a little.

But I came home and sat on his bed. His room is clear, his desk empty. I walked into the garage and my tools still lie scattered on the bench with the remains of the final projects of late-boyhood. I suspect they will have no appeal upon his occasional return. A sense of something ending lingers indistinctly but decisively in the air.

Just under nineteen years ago, we could walk around to any town, drive to any friends and, bump and tiredness notwithstanding, stay out as late as we liked without consideration for anyone else. Then my son came crashing into our lives with a powerful set of lungs and vocal cords and a requirement for constant attention. Our time was no longer our own. Then less than two years later, my daughter arrived and now we were tethered, happily I add, to the home for the routines of daily life and the care of little, developing human beings.
And what a journey it was! I confess, I enjoyed most of it joyously.
There were the little innocent questions, the answers to which formed the growing understanding of the world, the little unselfconsciously offered child opinions on things, which delighted me with their funny little interpretations of a confusing existence.
I became expert in adhesives from mending broken toys brought to me by hopeful little faces. I regressed to my own childhood whilst skipping hand in hand with toddlers through the shops.
I became finally "responsible" as, together with my wife, we charted sensible courses through the sometimes troubled seas of parenthood with the ultimate aim of bringing to successful adulthood, two small offspring of our own conception.

Well, now all the huge shoes are gone from the shoe rack. The coat rack is almost empty as the big vintage overcoats are transplanted to another hall over a hundred miles away.
We have done our job and been successful by any measure.

And so, dropping him off with the gathered possessions of his own choosing, making and collecting, a task is complete. An independent adult, accompanied by vast amounts of food that we bought for him, is now starting out on his own in hopeful anticipation.

And here, the house seems somehow empty. Its a strange feeling and I am not really comfortable with it. But probably I shall get used to it. It is how things should be after all. He might phone sometimes and possibly he will be home in the holidays.

But now I get a sense of how my own mother must have felt leaving me all those decades ago in that god-forsaken campus in South Wales, her feelings being something very distant from my own self-absorbed bewilderment and excitement at my new situation.
Sorry, Mum. I had no idea! You left me with the Red Cross Parcel. I remember it well, and was grateful. I see now the box of food is not just sustenance for the coming weeks, but a token of the love we won't be able to give in person but which we hope will be apparent in every opened tin or bacon sandwich.

So now, we have only one offspring to focus on for the two years until her own similar departure. I hope she can cope with the increased attention!

And then, perhaps, when both are set on their courses, in about two years, independent apart from the occasional financial injection from us, the job will be largely done. Two independent human beings produced to contribute to society, enjoy their own lives as people and to hopefully nurture us when we become toothless and incontinent.

Call home sometimes, though, Son, won't you.

Resolving Landscapes

And once more, here I am in my favourite German hotel, in the most interesting town in Westfalia. My room has no view this time, only the wall of the building opposite, which is not particularly inspiring even given its mirrored cladding.
On my way here today, I had to go and pick up a colleague from his house, since he is a participant in tomorrow's meetings here. His house is a newly built dwelling on a piece of land near to the small village where I grew up. I rarely go back there as I find the smallness and insularity of it oppressive and it ushers into my mind those exact feelings of remoteness and loneliness that I experienced as an adolescent there with only a bicycle as a means of escape.

As I approached, it struck me how beautiful the place is. The scarp above the village is the beginning of the Cotswolds, designated as an Area of Outstanding Beauty and frankly, it very much is.
I won't say that this escaped my notice as a boy. I was always aware of how glorious the countryside was and how picturesque the vista of rolling English hills was that rose only a mile or so from our back garden. Oh, I was perfectly aware of all this. I just didn't really care because it represented unwelcome solitude and the bounds of my mental as well as physical horizon.
Villages have their advantages. Not much crime happens and it is quite secure. But they are boring and claustrophobic and you cannot so much as fart loudly without some busybody reporting it to the local Parish Flatulence Officer and everyone pointing at you in the pretty little streets for the next month.

So, it was an unwelcome revisitation that I undertook this morning to my home village, after so many years..
Down the lanes I went, the lanes that were visible from my bedroom some thirty years ago, lanes I ran, walked, cycled along. As I drove, slowly for this is a great equstrian area and many nervous horses lurk around corners (not in a furtive way you understand, but you can encounter them suddenly and disastrously if you are not careful), the ghost of another Pete rode along with me. A smaller, scruffier, more constrained Pete watched as the trees went by and shuddered slightly at the crossing of the parish boundary.

In many ways, things have changed. There are plantations of sycamore and pine grown to maturity where last I looked they were mere twigs in their deer-proof tubes. Houses are different colours. Barns have tumbled to ruins. But the big trees, the oaks and ashes they are much the same as I remember and look familiar in an unremarked kind of way. The landscape before me corresponds to a topography that is burned into my memory such that the new copses remain largely unseen and the countryside of my childhood is still somehow the landscape that I see.

And it seemed incongruous to me that this young lad, his world so small and limited would find the purpose for my being here this day incomprehensible: I am on my way to an airport to fly across Europe for my work, as I do regularly and without remark to myself, save those times I look up and with the words of the Talking Heads ringing in my ears as so often, say to myself: "How did I get here!?"

That boy who aspired to no more than a job as a truck driver, would not comprehend what he would one day become and do. "An Aeroplane? Me? For a job? No. No you must mean somebody else.." Ok, it's not head of the U.N. certainly, but to a country urchin of the 1970s, it might as well be.

Our destinies twist and turn, taking us places we would ever expect and sometimes we stop and look honestly at our situation, with a sudden older perspective, and we are astonished, unbelieving. That ragamuffin child, all long wild hair and tatty canvas coat, he is still here. Not merely a wraith of someone long gone, leaving only an echo of a presence, but still here. I am him. Oh, certainly he has been added to, distorted to some extent perhaps, toughened in places and abraded in others. But there, not so deep down, there he is peering out fearful, but occasionally excited, to see what still awaits.
The boundary that was the horizon has expanded beyond what he ever dreamed.

But at our core, do not all of us have our embryonic selves in some way still extant? Do they not occasionally look out of our eyes and halt a foot about to take a step, out of trepidation and uncertainty?
I am glad I bumped into him again. I shall consider his needs and senssitivities, but I shall also be aware of when he is unduly influencing my decisions and when his small way of seeing the world is hampering progress towards a more interesting and exciting life.

And sometimes I will indulge him, like now, when I shall bounce on the bed in this hotel room as if it was a trampoline and no admonishing adult will come to the rescue of the springs.

Fly with Respiratory Airways

Oh deep joy... written a couple of weeks ago when i still had a holiday to look forward to.

Once more I find myself in an airport. Terminal one at London Heathrow. I have hardly travelled this year and this is the first time in nearly two months that I have assumed my business persona, clicking into the routine easily and without undue thought.
I like to travel comfortably, but also with a slight dash of style and so today I am wearing my favourite summer suit in cream linen, referred to as "That Suit" by a friend of mine who was most taken with it when it graced my frame in a profile picture somewhere. So, beautifully made is it that it even has a small, lined pocket in the left breast for my reading glasses that I can no longer deny I need.
Refusing to be one of those business types, all grey suit and self-importance, that one sees so many of in the course of business travel tapping on a laptop hurriedly and worriedly or talking loudly and obtrusively into their phones, I use instead the email function of my phone. It has no text editor and so this is the only way I can write on it. Its tiny qwerty keyboard is rather tortuous to use but such is the dexterity of the opposable thumbs so characteristic of our species that I can relatively easily enjoy a reasonable level of self-expression before thoughts elude me, otherwise escaping out of my ear and into the ether to be lost forever.

It occurs to me that in most of the airports I have been in this year, the only way from security to the flight gates is actually through a shop. This strikes me as somehow cynical and mercenary: You cannot avoid this minor temple of commerce, selling as it does, overpriced spirits, perfume and general tat. It would be forgivable if there was an alternative route and you could choose not to wander past the deceitful "Low Price!" tags on the gin bottles, but there is not. No, the path takes you through the shop and you have no choice but to go with it. Of course, it snares enough of the unwary and ill-informed whose foraging urges lead them to hunt a bargain, only to discover disapointingly on their next visit to Tesco that it in fact was anything but.

Two Chinese girls alight beside me on the adjacent seats. So happy are they to be in a departure lounge in London that they try to take a photo of themselves. I offer to take it for them and they are embarrassingly grateful, all unfeasably cheerful smiles and schoolgirl excitement.

And boarding commences. Up everyone rushes. I can see no point in standing in a queue that moves so interminably slowly so I stay here writing until there is only one person left in it. I wander through to the jetway with my stub of boarding pass and on to the plane where everyone is still milling in the aisle deciding if they should keep their jacket on or roll it up and stuff it in the overhead locker. They dither, doing neither and we all wait while indecision rules the space.

So, now, later, sat uncomfortably in seat 30b, sandwiched between two fellow inmates, I am wedged for two hours or so. It is an unfortunate fact that the space allocated for each of the passengers in economy class is insufficient to house my frame. I am not unduly large but my straightened legs allow my feet to be visible to the person sat in front of me and my shoulders are wider than the seat so they occupy the spaces where my neighbours' shoulders should be. This is unavoidable. The seats should be at least as big as the passengers and not comfortable only for the person of average size, such that by definition 50% of people are too big to fit.

I can see now below us, a beautiful blue English Channel, as we English feel justified in calling it. At various angles to each other are tiny ships, their wakes visible as white streaks behind them. I feel a sudden pang of longing to be by the sea. That possibility seems a world away to me now. Indeed, it will be several weeks before I am in a position to contemplate such a trip, such are my commitments.

Momentarily disheartened, I sink back into my seat and indulge myself in a daydream of being sat on the step of my van, a mug of tea in my hands and the breeze and seagulls making the only sounds I can hear. It gives disproportionate comfort to imagine being there and though I can conjure up immaculate details of what I would see, its not the real thing, solace though it is.
We hit turbulence. It seems strange that clouds can be so bumpy. They are after all merely water vapour and we know we can pass our hands through fog and feel no resistance. But at five hundred miles per hour, the change in density is as significant as that of the coffee table as your shin hits it at four miles an hour in the dark.
I watch, amused, as two hundred heads wobble left, then right, then left again, as the plane lurches and bounces along. Only from the back of the plane can this collective capital oscillation be seen. It makes me smile every time.

Such flights are, happily, not crowded with eventfulness. Again, it strikes me how mundane it has become to soar above the clouds at inconceivable speeds. I turn my mind to the idea.
Somehow, at 500 miles per hour, one tends to think a little more clearly, removed as we are from the distractions of modern life by the confinement to an aeroplane seat, with all the attendant discomfort and privations that implies.

That I should, in the course of my day job, be frequently on an aeroplane would have bewildered my young, wild self. I may have occasionally looked up from the fields and footpaths of 1970s Gloucestershire at a passing vapour trail and wondered briefly at the mechanical and chemical processes by which it had been formed, but it would have seemed sheer folly to suggest that on a regular basis, my employer, one of the world's biggest computer companies, would pay me to travel up there, albeit in cramped discomfort.
But here I am, en route to Munich where I will speak the German that I felt was so pointless when I was first compelled to learn it at age twelve.
And the words of the song come echoing back to me "and you may ask yourself How did I get here?" How indeed?

So, lulled by the engine noise, I close my eyes and lean my head back on to the too-low headrest and nod off. Until..

Phlegmatic: Not given to displays of emotion, difficult to excite, full of phlegm. Its definitely the latter definition...
Sharing an aeroplane with several hundred other people in enforced proximity always causes me to remark to myself just how revolting certain aspects of respiration really are.
The only other time the mechanisms by which we supply oxygen to our blood and hence bodily tissues is at the theatre when I am astonished at just how much people cough.

I did not ask to sit next to the rude, taciturn bearded man. I suppose that I did choose my seat myself as I checked in, from the screen in the departures hall, and so I have some culpability in my subsequent location.
But the grunting, hacking and snorting that has assailed my ears since boarding has been utterly stomach-churning. Never have I been so aware of the movement of this most particularly unpleasant and seemingly viscous of the humours.
It makes me quite bilious.
Now, I am a tolerant person, but I am certain that all this hacking and squelching is unnecessary. Frankly, I fear it may drive me to violence ere long. I put in my earphones and find some music that feels appropriate to being at 37000 feet: Ether Song, by Turing Brakes. Yes, that will do. I have forty minutes now till we all stand up and mill about with nowhere to go. I might as well go back to sleep.
With the building criscendo of the guitar, I slide into happy oblivion.

Sound at the Speed of Light

Sometimes a small point will intrude into the muddy pool that is my consciousness and send a ripple to the surface, demanding further examination. Occasionally, if I am not otherwise occupied, and indeed, often when I should be, a curious and entertaining facet of our Universe will emerge insisting on philosophical scrutiny.

One such notion appeared to me today. I was listening to BH on Radio4, as I often do on a Sunday, whilst dripping marvellous marmalade absent-mindedly onto my trousers from my toast. A piece came on from someone who had noticed a strange phenomenon pertaining to the chimes of Big Ben.

It appears that at a distance of about 300m from the tower housing the iconic clock and its campanological companion, when listening on the radio to the "bongs" which announce the passage of time, it is possible to apparently hear the chime before it actually happens.

Astonishingly, The Wireless will play you the sound of the bell approximately one second before you hear it with your own ears. How intriguing! How can this be?

Well, it appears that this illustrates the enormous difference between the speed of light and the speed of sound. As a child, sound and light were somehow related inasmuch both conveyed information to us, only of course at seven years old, I didn't really think of seeing and hearing as information. Nevertheless, they seemed to be manifestations of the same kind of thing: What our senses receive. So, it seemed quite strange that later, when I began to have a grasp of physics, to discover that they are in fact two entirely different mechanisms, moving two different types of energy in entirely different ways, one compressive and relying on a medium, and the other, radiation, able to travel through a vacuum (ok, leaving out "the Ether" as a concept, now largely abandoned) as a mish-mash of electricity and magnetism (that I frankly still can't quite reconcile in my poor, overly-spherical head).

But here we have a perfect example of how the two differ.

So, how do we hear the bell on the radio before it actually seems to chime within our actually range of hearing.
Well, it is less mysterious in actuality, but nonetheless delightful in explanation:
The microphones that pick up the chime for the BBC, and which carry the sound to the radio transmitters and thence to the radios of Britain and the World, are mere metres away from the source of the sound. As such, the characteristic "bong" reaches us as the speed of radio waves, plus the time it takes the sound to go a few meters to the microphone. In effect, instantaneously.

Whereas, being physically 300m from the source of the sound means that, at the speed of sound (340 metres per second at sea level) it takes approximately a second or thereabouts to reach our eardrums.
So, on the radio, it arrives pretty much as it happens but over the intervening London air, it arrives about a second later.

Isn't that a delightful and strange thought?