This is because tomorrow, my mother is due to fly out to the U.S. to come and stay for a week. Except she might not be able to, because a volcano in Iceland is currently spewing ash into the air and all UK airports are on complete shutdown.
Naturally this has caused chaos - for those of you who have been living in a black hole for the past five days, the airline industry is losing some £130m a day and there are roughly 150,000 Britons currently stranded abroad, according to the BBC.
Of course my mother is only one of those facing travel chaos, and her situation is relatively unstressful - she is still at home, at the time of writing her flight has yet to be cancelled and she is not about to get married, attend a funeral or be at the birth of a baby, like many of those stuck. But it is frustrating nevertheless - and I cannot settle to anything until I know for sure whether she is coming or not. Cue frantic scouring of the web to see if I can find any sort of definitive information whatsoever.
There is a part of me that simply holds up my hands and shrugs. Because there is nothing that we can do about all of this. Despite the desire to point the finger at someone (note the rising chorus of airline bosses pointing the finger at Europe's governments for continuing to allow airport shutdown when they say it is actually safe to fly), but in reality, we cannot stop the volcano spewing and nobody actually wants to risk passenger safety without very good reason.
So I sit and wait, unable to settle and checking, checking, checking. I'll keep you posted....
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