So many people and so many events have been impacted by the volcanic ash over Europe which has grounded flights for five days now.<\/p>\n
On Friday, I attended a seminar on postal services at the London office of Consumer Focus and my colleagues Rick and Keillin from Northern Ireland were unable to catch their flight and had to use a video link.<\/p>\n
On Saturday, my sister Silvia celebrated her 60th birthday with a big party in Leicester and our brother Ralph could not make it because he had flown to Belgium to attend an academic conference in Ghent and could not get back.<\/p>\n
Today my friend Eric should have been in Brazil giving a speech at a conference in Sao Paolo, but he is still in London and will have to address his remarks over a video link in his living room.<\/p>\n
At the 60th birthday party, I spoke to an Anglican minister who suggested that the experience of flights being grounded should in turn ground us. He saw it as a humbling experience that should teach us that we are less in control of our world that we often think we are.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
So many people and so many events have been impacted by the volcanic ash over Europe which has grounded flights for five days now. On Friday, I attended a seminar on postal services at the London office of Consumer Focus and my colleagues Rick and Keillin from Northern Ireland were unable to catch their flight […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2254","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-british-current-affairs"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2254","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2254"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2254\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2256,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2254\/revisions\/2256"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2254"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2254"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2254"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}