As you read these words, I expect to be whizzing somewhere over Europe, possibly in the vicinity of the Pyrenees.
My mission is a kind of pastoral visit on behalf of Eumetsat in Darmstadt, Germany, to the meteorologists of Portugal to talk to them of weather satellites.
And as I land at Lisbon Airport, I shall be thinking of Voltaire and of the nasty effect that Lisbon had on him.
Voltaire's most enduring work, a satirical novel called Candide, was written following a tragedy in November 1755. On the morning of All Saints' Day, two violent tremors shook the city of Lisbon to its foundations; rows of houses fell like dominoes, chasms yawned in the streets and churches collapsed upon their congregations.
An onlooker some distance out to sea described the entire city as "waving to and fro like a windblown field of corn".
Of the city's 275,000 inhabitants, some 15,000 died immediately in the devastation of the tremors and the tidal wave which followed: as many again succumbed to fire, disease and other hardships in the aftermath.
The earthquake had a profound effect on European thinking. The middle of the 18th century had been a very optimistic time, and philosophers, a little like some meteorologists today, were confident that the science of Newton and Galileo would ultimately give humans the capability of making Earth a kind of paradise.
However, the causeless Lisbon tragedy brought home to thinking people the fact that nature still had powerful, unpredictable and seemingly malicious forces which would always be beyond control.
Voltaire was no exception in this atmosphere of disillusion: indeed he epitomised the change of mood. The former advocate of tout est pour le mieux dans le meilleur des mondes possibles - all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds - was jolted out of his complacent optimism, and became the influential sceptic of his later years.
The eponymous hero of Candide survives the cataclysm at Lisbon and many more adventures, but with each new experience his simple optimistic view of life is savagely and systematically destroyed. In the end, il faut cultiver notre jardin is his philosophy - "We must cultivate our garden" - and we should be selfish and attend firstly to our own affairs
Does it take an earthquake, I wonder, to have this cathartic consequence, or could Lisbon on its own have this effect on me?
Perhaps in a few hours I will know.