Back home ...
I'm back home now. My body is telling me it's 3:30am tomorrow rather than 6:30pm today, and I've got a whole load of stuff to deal with (personal, professional, and just plain mundane — "the car won't start" kind of stuff that needs sorting out).
Will check in later ... for now, let's just say that I've survived 24 hours on a 747-400 intact, although my sinuses are aching from the aridity of the air conditioning and I keep going cross-eyed. Hmm. I'm probably so jet-lagged I don't even feel jet-lagged any more. Scary!
Oh yeah: the trip home was more or less ordinary — heavy turbulence over the Straits and Afghanistan (I managed to sleep through much of it but dreamed I was flying through heavy turbulence in a different aircraft), an arrivals cock-up at Heathrow (what genius decided to offload a full Jumbo using a staircase and a fleet of busses at the far side of the terminal from arrivals?), and lastly ... sundogs seen over the Scottish borders! I wish I'd thought to take a photo but I was too entranced by the sight of a circular rainbow with the shadow of a 757 at its heart scudding across the cloudtops.
Later I'll try to write something about Oz. But right now, I'm too drained.
UPDATE: I seem to have gotten home about twelve hours before the shit hit the fan (and via a flight that wasn't directly threatened). It will be interesting to see if there really was a plot to blow up a bunch of airliners flying from the UK to the USA, but I'm glad I managed to miss the resulting cock-up (twelve hour waits at airports, a total ban on hand luggage, and so on).
Comments
Sorry there was no chance of hooking up. My mother is in for surgery next week, and I'll probably be over to Oz in September.
Posted by: Tony Quirke | August 10, 2006 12:21 AM
"Later I'll try to write something about Oz" -- such as: "Somewhere over the [circular] rainbow..."
That's the themesong of the classical computer programming paper: "Toto considered harmful."
Seriously, did you keep a digital diary of rough notes to be massaged into back-home blogging? I am surely not alone in wanting to read whatever you write on the subject!
Posted by: Jonathan Vos Post | August 10, 2006 7:05 AM
Envy -- I've always wanted to go there. A couple of my brothers have, and loved it.
Posted by: S.M. Stirling | August 10, 2006 10:16 AM
You got back just in time -- a few hours later and you'd probably have been unable to get home;
Heathrow is no longer accepting inbound flights and most other flights are being cancelled:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/4778575.stm
Posted by: Canis Lupus | August 10, 2006 11:13 AM
Welcome back. As Canis said, it was just as well you weren't flying a day later.
Being the whizz you are with obscure ways of death, any ideas how you combine baby food to create explosives? Is that why they call it 'formula'?
Posted by: Martyn Taylor | August 10, 2006 11:46 AM
Charlie, wonderfully fortuitous of John Reid to make a speech about forgoing liberties for the short term whilst we fight terrorism, when the day after the shit hits the fan...
Posted by: Christopher Teague | August 10, 2006 12:50 PM
John Reid: using tomorrow's tragedy to justify today's politics.
Yesterday, I was thinking he was crying wolf to drum up support for his somewhat draconian anti-civil-liberties policies. Today I'm thinking he behaved disgracefully: talking about an imminent threat, while a major operation was in train to shut down such a plot, risked alerting the plotters.
And tomorrow?
Well, one might ask why the UK is subject to this particular type of terror threat. Because, you know, we had mad islamicists trying to blow airliners out of the sky every day of the week, before Mr Tony decided to join W's war-on-terror circus -- didn't we?
Posted by: Charlie Stross | August 10, 2006 1:00 PM
Fuck! I only just realised that you got home shortly before this. Have been reading about it in other people's blogs.
Gawd.
Will email you shortly. Sorry not to meet up on the Sunday in Sydney!
Posted by: Peter | August 10, 2006 1:47 PM
"Being the whizz you are with obscure ways of death, any ideas how you combine baby food to create explosives? Is that why they call it 'formula'?"
Combine Cow & Gate chocolate pudding with a baby. Any parent will tell you what the results look like, at both ends. For chemical warfare, broccoli and cheese. For mind-mangling cthulhoid fishy horror, Fishermans' Pie.
Posted by: Andrew Dennis | August 23, 2006 12:41 PM