Grounded, with a sense of calm amid chaos

This is a Europe-wide crisis for which there is no reason for airlines, politicians, or anyone else to be blamed

THIS WAS to have been what is rather coyly referred to as a holiday column, written on some eternal topic that is not news-dependent, and filed well in advance so that you could read it as my plane left the runway at Dublin airport. Oh well.

It has been quite a weekend. First of all getting friends into the country from the UK on Thursday (they managed to get the packed ferry) and as of now, Sunday afternoon, trying to get them back out again. The ferry companies gave up answering their phones some time ago, it seems. The website of the only ferry company with a reservation available seized at about lunchtime.

Meanwhile, the prospect of a friend’s longed-for trip to Perth, Australia, in order to see her family – due to begin on Sunday when she caught a connecting flight to Heathrow – has vanished for the foreseeable future.

Some athletic types have been unable to run in some sort of marathon in France.

One of the friends who was to accompany me to Egypt is in England, trying to get back here.

A commercial company is going to send its merchandise, along with one of its executives, to the Far East via the United States, if it can. Tuesday is the deadline for the delivery to Asia and the Irish company cannot afford to lose more money in these tough times; at this point it has waited too long to send the stuff by courier.

As the Perth person says, the prospect of being part of some global backlog is much more alarming than having your flight cancelled. A week’s cancelled flights followed by a week in a queue for a flight slot is not really a recipe for repose. My friend is thinking of rescheduling her trip altogether, and not going until later in the year.

However, she does feel vindicated in one respect. In the most feverish discussions on the subject of the weather in which it has ever been my privilege to participate, this girl has favoured Evelyn Cusack from the start. The rest of us refused to believe that the shut-down could last to the end of this week, as predicted by the forecaster Cusack – that is why, for example, our UK friends did not make a return booking with the ferry company when they arrived on Thursday – but the Perth person had faith in her from the start. And now it looks like Evelyn was right all along.

It is, as Sky News inimitably put it, “a Europe-wide crisis which politicians can do little to ease”. Notwithstanding the rather lacklustre British election campaign, and the funeral of the Polish president, politicians do not really have a place in this news story. It’s the meteorologists and the volcanologists who are centre-stage now. Eyjafjallajökull is easy for them to say.

Yet, for those of us who are not involved in these dramas, and who are not trying to get a night’s sleep in the departure lounge of any of Europe’s strangely silent airports, a terrible calm has descended.

Our livelihoods do not hang in the balance, we were not on our way to the death-bed or the funeral of a loved one, we are not scrubbed up on the transplant table, waiting for our salvation to touch down.

Quite a lot of air travel is driven by nothing stronger than consumer whim, and for those of us in that rather luxurious position there is a sort of peace in the enforced paralysis. One cannot even be angry, because the total shutdown of airspace is not anyone’s fault. You’ve got a serious absence of malice here.

The closest anyone can find to a target for their ire is the travel insurance companies, and at the time of writing it is not even clear if they have behaved badly. Many of the airlines have behaved very well, agreeing to honour bookings that were disrupted by this “act of God”, a rather comforting phrase which encourages us all to give up the struggle and resign ourselves to the inevitable. Ah, that’s better.

The withdrawal of the continent’s air services is such a shock to us that it has shown us how much we take them for granted. They have never been closed for such a long period in living memory. Airspace is actually psychological space in some strange way, and what seems unnatural to us is not that we can go anywhere on the planet that we desire, but being unable to go where we want, when we want. The shutdown of the skies has even served as a reminder that we live on an island; a reminder that is obviously necessary every now and then.

Mark my words, there will be a television drama made of what we can still hope will be a few short days of cancelled aircraft. It might be a co-production by a couple of European television stations and if so it is pretty much guaranteed to be a disaster. But even if the putative television drama is very well done it can never hope to contain the remarkable stories this Europe-wide crisis has engendered. And of course it could never clearly represent the relief of those to whom it meant nothing more than rearranging their holidays.