11.03.03
Flying to … where?
I haven’t posted anything about my recent holiday, particularly the flights, partly because I have yet to write an appropriately icy letter to the airline concerned asking for compensation. It’s fortunate that the holiday itself was excellent, wonderful, just what the doctor ordered, &c.
But there is something interesting about the journey. At about 4pm Sunday last our plane took off from a European country (part of the EU, in fact) and landed in the same country at 7am the next morning (Monday). It was a direct flight.
Where were we flying from - and to where?
Peter said,
November 3, 2003 at 11:17 pm
Ah, Jonathan, it must either have been the country of my mother’s birth on the theory anything can happen there (I will tell you the story one day of how I obtained entry to their national library –it involved a visiting card and a lot of sark), or it was the country of my grandmother’s birth on the grounds that it’s the only one big enough to keep you in the air for so long.
Had you arrived before your departure I would have concluded Zembla, my lost, my irrecoverable.
Peter said,
November 3, 2003 at 11:19 pm
Ah, now I’ve got it. La Martinique is technically a departement of France and therefore in the EU. Quand bleuira sur l’horizon la Desirade, stuff like that.
Jon said,
November 4, 2003 at 10:09 am
That’s close enough for me. Guadeloupe, in fact, but the same conditions apply: it is a departement of France and so is, logically, legally, inescapably, part of Europe.
Naturally the currency is now the Euro. It’s noticeable how the locals refer to France as ‘la metropole’. Several of them also accusingly pointed the finger at this summer’s heatwave across the Ile de France as the source of this autumn’s turgidly long, wet and hot hurricane season, as if the lands are connected not just politically but physically. Or perhaps it’s a sort of Gallic spooky action at a distance.