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London Heathrow Holiday Inn, Friday 10.50pm

You know, I really don't need my LJ fix badly enough to pay UKP15 for access that I shouldn't, if I'm sensible, use for more than an hour or so anyway.

So I'm typing this into an emacs window, and I may or may not post it when I get home tomorrow. It's been a long day. I'm hot and sticky and barely competent to be around even the frazzled version of society that consists of travellers arriving at Heathrow on a Friday evening. I threw a large suitcase down a railway-station escalator at a congenial colleague this afternoon, and then we sat in the Copenhagen airport chatting for so long that I'm not at all sure he made his flight, though I didn't see him around afterwards. The battery door on my apology for an MP3 player broke while I was trying to use it in a blessedly quiet corner of the airport, rendering the silly thing effectively unusable for the lack of a half-millimetre of plastic. ( It can be persuaded to work with a judiciously applied hair elastic, but I didn't have a spare one in my hand luggage.) The hotel room is rather nice, though, and I'm cranking the A/C, summer having apparently arrived at last.

I gather pound coins with bridges on are real after all, so I only picked up one dodgy (Gibraltar) one at the Manchester airport, not two. They still look very dubious to me, though, not at all in the usual style.


I didn't bring so much as a postcard back from Denmark. This is mostly because Ididn't see much of the place; just the Institute where the meeting was, and the lakes and streets between there and the hotel, none of which are really postcard-worthy. I didn't even take that many pictures.

I want to be home, now. Only about 32 hours to go ...
(And the MP3 player is playing 'Long Long Journey', and for once I actually heard at least half of it.)



Chicago Terminal 3, Saturday, 1.45pm CST

Friday had a couple of final annoyances to throw at me after I shut down the computer. It turned out that I'd left my toothpaste in Copenhagen; and when I finally collapsed into bed the mattress turned out to be rock-hard.

Today has been better -- in fact, one of the pleasanter transatlantic flights I've had in a while. I got to the airport about 7.15 for a 10.25 flight, and no-one stopped me joining the check-in line. It was busy, but not unduly so, and the introduction of the new American-style procedures means they've finally stopped giving people the third degree about the history and provenance of every gadget i their possession. I did get randomly searched at the gate, but that was painless. The flight itself was not bad at all. I had a window seat, well back behind the wing, with a great view, and the plane was a 777. I like 777s. I think they must have slightly higher cabin pressure than most big jets; at any rate, I don't get nearly as much internal discomfort as I usually do on long-haul flights. I got a lovely glimpse of the Lake District from just offshore; from that height, it looks very small, just a little knot of rumpled brownish hills and blue lakes, with the great sandy spread of Morecambe bay in the foreground. I also got clear views of the Isle of Man, and tantaling glimpses of southern Greenland through a motheaten cloud blanket. The stretch of northeast Canada was mostly clear. That's an amazing and faintly disturbing landscape to someone who grew up with English 'fields and woods and little rivers.' It goes on and on, hundreds of miles of it, almost as much water as barren snow-flecked land with never a sign of habitation anywhere. Here and there a river meanders, or a thin, almost straight raised formation -- an igneous intrusion? -- scars across hills and lakes alike.

The landscape around Lake Michigan is very different -- flat, green, and neatly ruled into quarter-sections. That square gridwork is rather amazing, really; to a European, it seems like an amazingly hubristic -- and not very imaginative -- thing to do to thousands of miles of territory. England -- and Denmark, as I noticed this week -- clothe themselves in a crazy quilt of green and yellow and brown, with ancient boundaries curving across the landscape, governed by the shape of the land and centuries of local history.

Anyway, here I am, with six hours to wait in an airport that isn't particularly accommodating to passengers with stupidly long connection times. I'm typing this in a seat at a quiet gate at the near end of one of the concourses; they probably won't even guess at a gate for my flight for another three hours, but there are almost no common seating areas except in the bars and restaurants. I should go and get a mocha or something, I suppose.


And here I am, with the air conditioning running, watching the Tucson late-night news, tired and a bit sore but basically in good shape. I have told the computer it's back on Arizona time, but LJ doesn't seem to have quite cottoned on yet.