I clearly have too much time on my hands and sport on the brain, and this is most definitely a bad combination. The sport bit seems somewhat unavoidable now - for a start the cricket's got off to a reassuringly ambling start at Lord's and my race is looming, and I came home from almost two weeks marooned half way across the globe only to receive a reproachful ticking off from my Wii Fit, which chided "Even if you're busy you should still take time to exercise." BUSY?! You don't know the half of it. You're a MACHINE! Yes, my Wii Fit is like a jealous partner, immediately suspicious should I spend time with any other exercise aid. My Wii Fit doesn't take the time to find out that actually I was ragging it up a tower in Boston. Having reprimanded me thus, Wii Fit, having told me in that unlikely helium-sucking voice to "Step on me" (which I always find a bit disconcerting), congratulated me on losing weight, then, when I scored 4 stars on a muscle workout, commented (somewhat proudly, as though it was somehow responsible for any sporting prowess on my part) "You're no stranger to exercise." Fickle machine. Didn't take back its wounding comments about my fitness commitment did it, though, hmm? Noooo.

Ahem.

So yes. My holiday came at possibly quite an opportune moment as my obsession with my new gadget, and my determination to get one over on it whenever possible, was in danger of spiralling out of control. "Unbalanced?" My partner caught me shouting at the screen after my fake little cartoon ski-jumper missed his take off and flew headlong down the slope in a giant snowball. "I'll show you unbalanced!"

"Do you think you might be taking this too seriously?" F ventured, gently prising the Wii remote out of my hand, which was fine, because I wasn't using it, I was too busy heading imaginary footballs at a fantasy goal while deftly dodging giant severed panda heads (no, I don't know either) and shouting "Get in! Oi, Taylor, where's my trial?"

So I had some unfinished business with my Wii Fit and its vilely nice fake personal trainer when I finally got home, and in case you're interested I've now beaten my high score on the hula hoop, step plus (yes PLUS - none of this half-arsed step for me), football, ski slalom, pretty much every muscle workout and yoga pose, not to mention the aforementioned ski jump, and my husband is starting to forget what I look like. Then Wii Fit - yes, the Wii Fit that told me it hadn't seen much of me lately - told me to take a break. So I skulked off to the gym and rowed 5K instead. SEE, WII FIT??? I CAN LIVE WITHOUT YOU!! BUT CAN YOU LIVE WITHOUT ME? HMM?

I also came home to the slighly improbable news that, in my brief absence, my football team had leapt inexplicably two places up the Division 2 table (remember that's Division FOUR to people who can count) to an unremarkable 14th as opposed to a dismal 16th. (Oh, don't worry, we've dropped back to 15th since and there's not a lot in it.) Overcome with excitement, my creative side jostled to get a word in edgeways, and the upshot is the first 3 verses of a 12-verse poem, which possibly shows I was reading too much Tony Harrison on the plane. Yes, as I said, too much time on my hand. You'll be pleased to know I just joined a choir...

Saturday. Another faceless town
Of pound shops and graffiti. Yet again
Supporters in their hundreds have come down
To brave the air of menace, and the rain.

Claret and amber-clad they left at dawn
With Ginsters to sustain them on their way
Longing for victory over rivals sworn,
Clinging to memories of glory days.

Four defeats in a row now, and one draw
Yet something tells them this time they will win it
If they can only maybe try to score,
Avoiding own goals in the ninetieth minute.

God bless the Irish

I love the Irish. I've always loved the Irish, because they are good-humoured and have good booze; they throw a great party, and they gave the world, amongst other things, The Pogues and Father Ted. I even love them for populating the world with bars which guarantee I can have a vaguely acceptable pint and watch some sport wherever I am in the world. And now I love them even more because they got me safely home. I love them in spite of the fact that their in-flight entertainment system broke, so I couldn't watch The Hurt Locker for the third time in an effort to catch the end without falling asleep. In fact, I giggled when, after two attempts to show the safety video and failing, a timid voice came over the tanoy saying "All flight attendants to their stations for a MANUAL check."

It seems we are not the only ones who love the Irish. The only other time I've been on a flight that has broken into spontaneous applause on hitting the runway was on a particularly bumpy flight back to Guernsey one winter, and in that instance passengers were showing their appreciation at not being dead, which is not quite the same.

Relieved to be finally back on British soil, tapping away on my own computer with Cocteau Twins playing away in the background as I sip proper tea, I've been browsing various news websites to find that many people haven't been too fortunate. Thousands are still abroad and will be until May. Oh and I was particularly interested by some of the comments here presumably from people who were not left in limbo for days in a foreign country. Now, as it happens, we did, in the end, have a rather good additional 4 days in the States, but this was only once we'd got out of the chaotic labyrinth that was the Response to the Volcano, i.e. personnel from the Foreign Office to Virgin Atlantic taking refuge under their desks and saying "Please don't hurt me!"

So what was the response? Well, it was this:
We were due to fly home on 19th from Washington. Our flight was cancelled. Fine, we thought. This has been going on for a few days. Virgin will have this in hand. So, as instructed by their website, we phoned them.

49 times.

On the 49th time, we eventually reached a recorded message (previous calls had cut us off or given us the engaged tone.) So we settled back to wait for a reply and listening to the recorded message, singing the praises of Virgin's complimentary amenity packs (they come with socks and eye masks. Oh yes.) We listened for two hours and 5 minutes. Then a chirpy woman called Rachel answered (I say chirpy... I'm lying...) Now to be fair to Rachel she'd probably been getting it in the neck all day from stranded Brits and had the right to be well and truly fed up with her lot on life by the time we got to her. Rachel offered us a flight on May 4th. We pointed out to her that this was over two weeks away, and perhaps not entirely practical, and thus followed the obligatory lecture on how we were not the only people stuck (a fact we were well aware of having encountered some very harrassed looking teachers and a hoard of teenagers from if their accents were anything to go by, somewhere in the Midlands, grabbing fast food at the Old Post Office earlier in the day - a position I can't even bear to imagine).The next day the skies began to clear and planes started flying, and by the following day things were almost back to normal. At any rate, US television had stopped covering it (it had been receiving, ooh, I'd say about 5 minutes each hour up until then. In fact, to my amusement, Fox News reported Nick Clegg's performance in the first TV debate above the fact that the whole of Europe was out of bounds, and the rest of the time were too busy calling Obama a Marxist to much bother about anything else.) So we tried to phone them again to see if anything had come up. We tried at 10pm and were on hold for 2 hours. We got up at 5am, and again, after 18 attempts, were put on hold. For two hours. At 7.15 we gritted our teeth and booked ourselves a flight from Boston a whole week earlier than the one we'd been promised by Virgin. Aer Lingus described availability on this flight as "good". We could, incidentally, also have flown into Schiphol, where we have a friend (he doesn't actually live at the airport, obviously, but nearby...) In fact, we would have been happy to be flown anywhere which meant we were on the right continent, and would make our own way back from there. We told Virgin this. They repeated that we had to take what we were given.

I'm not for a minute suggesting that Eric the Volcano (as I'm calling it, not even attempting to pronounce or spell its actual name) was in any way some sort of clever airline ruse to keep us trapped in the US, though I'm sure the US government will find a way of blaming Iran sooner or later. On the contrary, I do have some sympathy with the airlines, who must have all lost millions. However, to all the anonymous and supercilious web commentators out there, I'd like to make the following points:
- One commented that airlines were not putting their seat prices up for stranded passengers, they got to fly for free. Well, not quite. We got to fly for the price we'd paid if we were prepared to put our lives on hold for a fortnight. This would cost us, the airline company itself (who under EU law are obliged to pay our bed and board during that time) and our employers quite a bit of cash, while at the same time there are planes flying with empty seats.
- Yes indeed. We flew back with Aer Lingus - lovely, wonderful Aer Lingus - and counted 9 empty seats on that flight. And yet we were not offered the chance to fly back with a carrier other than our own. Virgin, who we'd paid already, could have offered us a transfer - even if they'd asked us to pay the difference. They didn't. (Some airlines apparently did.)
- This doesn't seem wholly fair. It seems even less fair when you realise there are families with young kids, and teenagers who are meant to be taking GCSE and A Level exams shortly, who are still stuck, and who don't have the money to just go ahead and book another flight. There were two of us - imagine being a family of 5?
- Yes, airlines pay bed and board, but you need to ask for that to be refunded AFTER You get back. Again, how on earth do they expect family groups to just pop sums like that on the credit card?
- Having browsed the internet, I realise that one thing that would be handy would be some sort of site that told you how to access healthcare abroad - what you might need to pay, and, specifically, how to get a prescription if yours runs out, and how much this might cost. Contacting the Embassy in such an instance involved access to a phone, and even if you got this far, you were then faced with another recorded message telling you if you were stranded you should "contact your airline or travel provider." My airline can't even staff its phoneline, let alone dish out drugs.

But, on a cheerier note, I want to say...
- Thank you to all the people who flooded my Facebook page with offers of places to stay all across America - and indeed to their cousins, friends and others whose floors and spare rooms they were volunteering for us.
- Thank you to all the people in the US who made us feel welcome, from waitresses to tour guides (with the exception of the bloke in the hotel who was obsessed with Baltimore. Mate, you need help! Get over Edgar Allan Poe, already, he's been dead for years. Oh, and the father who loudly told his kids in Boston that we had a nerve being there. I know - F and I personally kicked your ass at Bunker Hill and are now almost 300 years old! How can we show our faces?)
- Thank you to our friends in the UK who sent encouraging messages and listened to our email rants.
- Thanks to whoever the artist was who put these cows in Logan airport - yes, I'm not sure if the one on the left is wearing sunglasses or a black bra over its eyes, either...

- And once again thank you to the beautiful people of Aer Lingus.

Passing the time

So, what DO you do when you have an uncertain amount of extra days in a foreign country so vast you probably don't have the time to get to the interesting bits? Well, apart from spending 5 hours on hold to your airline listening to a recorded message so inane it's a miracle you don't end up throwing the telephone from your 8th floor window in disgust (the message begins "Hello Gorgeous, we're SO glad you called." Hello WHAT did you just call me?) there is, I suppose, the usual stuff you do on holiday, namely, for us:
- Climbing up some high things to take in the view. The fewer elevators en route the better. The resulting calf-aches are all part of the fun.
- Finding a good graveyard to mooch around. I love a good graveyard.
- And preferably a big old church to throw into the bargain.
- And, so you can say you've been, some art galleries jam packed with glorified innuendos from artists you've never heard of, but which you have to look at as you pass them in search of the one genuinely famous item in that museum, which invariably turns out to be on loan to the gallery you visited last year.

We did all of these things. In THREE cities. Bingo. Here are some highlights:

New York
A view from the ultimate High Thing, the Empire State Building (though it has lifts - and rather impressive ones at that.)


...and a memorial for 9/11 in a lovely church round the corner from Ground zero:


...and a spot of Jackson Pollock...


Washington:
A view from the tower of the beautiful National Cathedral - bam - two in one!

Oh and this was the Cathedral, in case you're interested:

We then proceeded to the art gallery at the Smithsonian, which was missing various things, but did include the Avercamp exhibition we'd already seen in Amsterdam 3 months ago.

Boston:
A big monument. 294 steps and no lift! Calves ache like hell. Mission accomplished!

And here's the view...

This handily formed part of the Heritage Trail, which also took you to no less than 3 churches and 3 graveyards: I don't know who Ezra Dibble is. I just like that fact his name was Dibble. Anyway, Boston Tourist Board, we love you, and we are forever in your debt. Now for a flight home...

Stranded

So what was meant to be a 7-day transatlantic jaunt has turned into a Kerouac-style 11-day epic, thanks to a volcano with a name so implausibly short on vowels I find it hard to acknowledge its existence. Anyway, because of said volcano (which I think starts with an E, so I'm going to call it Eric) I've seen rather more of the US than I cared to, including such centres of cutting edge, urban civilisation as Hartford, Connecticut...

... and Wilmington, Delaware...

...not to mention some random, seemingly nameless swathes of industry:

Slightly more interestingly, we whipped past Philadephia, famous for its soft cheese and the Fresh Prince of Bel Air:

... all accompanied by an unintentional but appropriate soundtrack of Eels, Bob Dylan, Arlo Guthrie, REM and Emmylou Harris. And if all the above isn't enough to whet your appetite and send you running towards the next Greyhound bus I don't know what is.

And it strikes me that this is one of the almost incomprehensible things about America as far as us Brits are concerned - it's so flippin' huge. Stranded in Washington D.C. with a promise of a flight a whole 12 days after ours was meant toleave (and a sound ticking off from Rachel at Virgin, who told us that there were hundreds of thousands of other people for whom they'd summarily failed to make adequate arrangements once airspace had reopened, and frankly we should ve grateful) we faced the prospect of 2 weeks in a motel in the arse-end of a city we'd already seen, or a trip to somewhere new entirely. The hotel receptionist, for reasons best known to himself, seemed adamant that his stranded guests should up sticks to Baltimore, and his insistence on the subject was so bordering on sinister that I think it's put me off ever venturing there. As we gathered - my other half and I, a stranded holidaying Dutchman and four geographers from Belfast who'd been in Washington on a conference - in the hotel loby bemoaning our lack of funds in this expensive city, he would cut in at random intervals with a sort of petulant drawl: "Go to Baltimore. Got to hostels.com. Take the megabus to Baltimore and go take a bottle of whiskey and sit by Edgar Allen Poe's grave."

Tempting though this might have been, we were eventually drawn to Boston, "nearby" by US standards and somehwere that warranted exploring. It would mean covering less than half the East coast at a cost of a few dollars each, and we'd see states we'd never see again (mainly because there isn't anything to see.) Boston was, in relative terms, not too far away, and would allow us to fly from Newark, New York or Logan with relative ease once Iceland's little shot at an apocalypse subsided. So we booked a bus and pootled off to Massachusetts with remarkable ease and no sense of urgency on the part of us or indeed the driver. 442 miles and 9 hours later, there we were - a journey about 1 and a half times the distance from London to Newcastle. Of the many little flurries of excitement we passed along the way was the welcome sign to Connecticut, which read "Welcome to Connecticut - we're full of surprises" (they lied - I was not surprised by anything during my brief visit) and a huge billboard declaring "When you die you will meet God," with an accompanying picture showing a heart monitor flatlining. I'm still not quite sure what to make of this, or indeed what the point of it was. More amusingly perhaps, not to say rubbing it in, was the following advertisement for Logan airport: This is more than a little ironic, not to say rubbing our noses in our predicament somewhat.

But not as much of this. As we put our heads together in that lobby trying to devise an escape plan, punctuated by an ocasional outburst of "You could go to Baltimore. Edgar Allan Poe's buried there. You can take a bus" a woman of indiscriminate Northern European origin walked past dragging a huge suitcase.

"Well, I am lucky, I am going home" she announced in matter-of-fact, clipped tones, as I tried to figure out if she was maybe Swedish, Danish or Dutch.

"Really? You've managed to get a flight? Where are you from?"

"Iceland."

A cold silence hit that room with a blast louder than any erruption Eyjafjallajökul could muster. Frankly I'm surprised she got out of there alive.

Sacrosanct

Inside everyone there's an emo trying to get out. Here she is:

You will not be remembered. Well, you might,
But not for something good, something you’d like
To be remembered for. But something else –
Some misremembered anecdote one tells
In front of weeping relatives amassed
Inside some faceless edifice. At last
Those quarrels are forgotten (for a while)
As kith and kin compete to show a smile
Between brave tears. And no-one dares to say
“I didn’t really know her.” Anyway,
That’s not the point – you cannot be the one
To say “She’s nothing special” now she’s gone.

They probably won’t mention how you died,
And will conceal all the times you tried
To disappear; to leave this world behind.
No, eulogies will emphasise the kind
Of things a eulogy’s designed to do
The times you cared for others, or when you
Said something really funny, or perhaps
Made some silly mistake. That little lapse
Of concentration – something really small
That made us laugh, but caused no harm at all.
They’ll talk about the scholarly success:
Certificates collected in excess
Of those around you; competitions won
And musical prowess, and all the fun
You had together - every football match
You cheered at, every evil plan you hatched
With your contemporaries, and all those beers
That you enjoyed together through the years.

They won’t mention you curled up on the floor
Shaking, the bloodstains drying on the door.
They all know now and wish that they had known
Then how you’d felt so desperately alone,
Had pulled apart the curtains every day
And wondered if you’d ever find a way
To leave all that anxiety behind,
That clawing sense of failure, and find
Some drug to somehow stem the rising fear
And panic, the inevitable tears.
But you couldn’t. And now what’s done is done.
The world will find a way of moving on
And you will find your memory enshrined
For evermore in some campaign for Mind
Or somesuch charity. And now it’s true,
Ironically, the "loser" that was You
Is living an unlikely legacy
In death. Now tell me, are you really free?
Did you succeed when we all felt you’d lost?
And did you ever stop to count the cost
Of this, your Master plan? And will you be
Remembered, or made sacrosanct? We’ll see.

Nothing to Declare

I WANT A PENSIONER!!! Actually, I'd quite like a puppy, too, but Frank won't let me. so until I convince him, an elderly Chinese woman would do as a stopgap.

The idea of having to declare a small Oriental pensioner at Customs amused me, hence the fact I ended up photographing this poster, which I saw in Hong Kong, land of Weird Signs usually stating the flippin' obvious ("Wash Hands After Toilet") or trying to put across something entirely incomprehensibly in cartoon form, like this one:


No, I don't know, either. Something to do with putting meatballs in holes, I think...

Yes, I have indeed been clearing out my Photo folders on my laptop.

Yes, that is indeed a dancing man dressed as a giant bee.

And yes, of course we lost against Bournemouth.

In what has turned out to be a fairly triumphal week I did indeed manage to write about Bradford City in my AKC paper, offering myself a self-congratulatory pat on the back as my pen scrawled across the page prattling on about how Durkheim's concept of "the sacred" could well be applied to its beleagured fanbase (my chaplain said it was relevant, and he is someone whose views on faith and football I trust implicitly). I also managed to have three of my "audience question" answers read out at The Now Show's recording last night, and will be perhaps unjustifiably joyful should they make the final cut. Earlier in the week I discovered that my church has its own cat, Sylvester. Not only that, he is apparently contactable by email. Frankly it's all a bit too exciting.

It's about to get a whole lot more exciting, too, because tomorrow I'm going to Bournemouth - yes, BOURNEMOUTH - to watch the Mighty Bantams take on... well, Bournemouth, obviously. OK, so perhaps this isn't quite a titanic clash comparable to, say, Barca vs Real Madrid, or Manchester United vs AC Milan, or even, if I'm honest, Huddersfield vs Preston Northend. But still, it's all relative, and I don't get out much. Bournemouth are good (well, again, it's all relative - when I say "good" I mean they're third in the table and thus tipped for promotion, and didn't end up with a draw in the last game as a result of two own goals.) More to the point, we drew with them last time, having as we do this habit of doing rather well against teams that are far better than us (we beat top-of-the-league Rochdale) and spectacularly badly against the likes of Barnet and Accrington Stanley. (Who are they?)

So here I am trying to second-guess Peter Taylor, wondering if he'll play James Hanson and wondering if it's very wrong to secretly kinda fancy James Hanson given that he looks about twelve. And I'm wondering what I'm going to wear, for this is no ordinary match. Oh no. My dad has secured, for reasons I don't quite understand but haven't questioned, posh tickets (as far as such a thing exists) for a pre-match four-course meal and half-time coffees etc. This means I have to hob-nob with Bournemouth fans; it also means I can't wear my replica shirt; it also means there is a dress-code, Bournemouth Hospitality People obviously thinking they're the management of Chinawhites, which states that I can't wear trainers or jeans. (HUH?!? IT'S A FOOTBALL MATCH!!!!!) So yes. I'm going to watch Bradford in a smart skirt and blouse. Um.

So on many levels, we'll see how that all goes. In the meantime I may email Sylvester the Cat and canvass his opinion on the subject.