KTH RDGWY

In London since last Thursday the sky has been unbroken blue. I’ve been going out to watch the sun set. At night I have seen the stars. The noise is of traffic and people. For once, there is no airplane noise. The city is a little calmer, a little more lovely. On Saturday while I was walking, I took photographs of the sky. I saw others doing the same, shyly, in the way that people get the cameras out when it’s snowing. It’s a nice feeling.

If we’re lucky - I mean if mankind is lucky - then we are living during the time when the planet is at its dirtiest, noisiest, most polluted. In a few generations time people will either be living in a cleaner better place, or they’ll be clambering over each other for higher ground, cooler latitudes, clean water, food. It’s a little annoying - to think that you are living either in the worst of times, or the end of times.

Eyjafjallajoekull has done us a favour. It’s a neat, relatively painless but still dramatic reminder that we live on a planet. You know. A big blob of rock and water floating in space. You might live in a nice house, in a sophisticated city, in a rich western country, with a pension and broadband and a credit card. But you’re hurtling through the universe, sustained by a delicate mixture of gases, protected by a paper thin atmosphere, in a narrow band of temperature between a hot death and a cold death, on a planet that is changing, moody, impermanent, given to outbursts of violence and driven by complicated systems of self regulation that don’t include our well being in their calculations. We’re all of us hanging by a thread. Or several threads, I suppose. The thread of unlimited cheap air travel, available at the drop of a hat, seems a bit frayed. It probably won’t snap, not yet, and over the next few days they’ll tie a knot in it and we’ll all be back on Ryan Air, complaining about the fact that they take us all the way across Europe in an afternoon, for the price of a new shirt, but don’t quite take us to the door of our hotel and want us to pay them for a sandwich.

We don’t know we’re born.