Travel

I do wonder sometimes how long peasants like me will be allowed to travel. One way or another they'll find a way to stop us. One the one hand it's 'easy', affordable, accessible, etc. You book online, 'check in' yourself, go to any of hundreds of glamorous destinations, get your few days in the baking heat.....   A massive, colossal infrastructure is there to support all this - motorways, airports, lounges, retail cities at the aiports including those astonishing wandering lanes through an unbelievable perfume quarter, with a wiggling black marble pathway marked out in gleaming stone flecked with millions of diamonds..... This chicane is a kind of hellish condensation of the whole thing - the corralling of the mob, entirely artificial, like a cattle run leading to the abbatoire entrance but with a horrible stench of expensive artificial smells.  Then there are the planes themselves, tin tubes hurling themselves up into the thinner air to save fuel, bashing through invisible waves of thick and thin air, up over the blissful blankets of cloud into baking hot light.... shooting us in a great arc through the atmosphere towards our distant holiday destinations.  The planes are a marvel, those huge fleets of them, carting millions of us, squashed into our tiny perches, every day, zigzagging across the planet.

It's all astonishing, and rather ghastly. This is what we call our 'holidays'.

Yestertday's trip to Stansted was by train - change at Stratford East (including walking through the shopping mall to the other station, which is huge and sprawls out like a great fat Victorian great-aunt, so many platforms and destinations...... Then up to Tottenham Hale, into the unsuspected greenery and almost rural old fields and marshes around the R Lea where they used to make gunpowder.  The platform there is made of hundreds of small bricks, and a huge number of passengers are heading as we were to the airport, and so are dragging their pull-along suitcases - hence the noise of all those hard little wheels thumping over the bricks is like a vast choir of huge crickets........   Then the Stansted Express with electric sockets to recharge your computer or phone....  So, a slightly tortuous but useful old route to the plane.

We had a delicious lunch at Leon - vegan salad and a fish curry - all made and served with pride, and then met our friends K and A, whose boat we will be sailing on.  The flight was 4 hours, the children aboard remained resolutely cheerful (kicking the back of my seat), the air was terrifically bumpy at first, the light over the clouds was dazzling.    The air in Corfu was like a steam bath.  Hotel Dalia is ten minutes walk from the airport and surprisingly quiet. Very elegant and nice.  We walked through the muggy air to find supper near the sea under the trees. Another marvellous salad, some garlic purée, hummus, fried shrimps.  The moon was a disgusting yellow hanging over the water. Bed was utterly blissful.. Today is the feastday of Corfu's patron saint, Ag. Spyridon. We are going see his litany - a procession round the old town.