Homeward bound

[ellarien]

I'm typing this in the Atlanta airport, sitting in a deserted gate area six hours before the plane leaves. It's 11am by my watch, 2pm here, 7pm in England. I got about two hours of sleep last night, rising at three and boarding the shuttle to the airport at 4.15 for a 6am flight. I dozed a bit on the flight from Tucson, and by the time the plane started descending the brain was starting to get traction again, enough for me to realize I probably left a couple of dead milk cartons in the fridge. I forgot the cardigan I meant to carry along, too. In the sleepy dark of the shuttle I was contemplating buying an overpriced airport sweatshirt, but when I woke up a little more I realized I could just open up the suitcase and grab one of the packed ones before I checked in.

I was not very impressed by the interface design of the newfangled 'USVisit' exit kiosks, where departing visitors are supposed to give their passport details and submit to fingerprints and a photograph. They're slick-looking touchscreen gadgets, rather like an e-ticket check-in terminal, but whereas those are a breeze to use, this was a nightmare, with a cluttered screen layout and a very short time allowed in which to find the right thing to press. The young man in attendance was very nice and patient, but by the time I was done I was rattled enough to drop my glasses, which I'd removed for the photograph. Fortunately they survived the fall.

It's grey and hazy outside -- cool enough here in the air-conditioning, but the 'transit vault' between the concourses was quite sticky. I hiked from B to D, then hopped on a train for the last leg to E.


I was musing last night on the meaning of home. It isn't a pointer that resolves to a single location, for me, and hasn't been since I first went away to university. There's home-where-I-live; currently that's Tucson, but before that it was London, and before that Birmingham. Home-where-I-belong is still Sheffield, to a very good approximation, but I spent enough years in Birmingham that it took on some of those attributes too. London never did -- perhaps just because I wasn't there long enough -- and I doubt Tucson ever will, at least as long as I have to deal with visas all the time.

This is Atlanta, home of CNN, and they just announced that all the July 21st would-be bombers are now believed to be in custody. That's good news, as far as it goes, and I'll take it to be going on with.

Now I'm going to slip in a DVD and lose myself in the 1800s for a couple of hours.



I arrived in Manchester about 9am, negotiated passport control, baggage claim and customs, and noticed that the train-times display in the baggage-claim hall was displaying a long list of destinations marked 'bus'. I bought a cereal bar to break a five-pound note for payphone change to call my mother, and then trundled over to the station to investigate. Sure enough, there was a man in an orange vest in the ticket hall, patiently explaining that the line was closed for engineering work and there would be no actual trains until Monday. One woman with a European accent found this hard to accept, protesting that she'd already booked her train. Buses to the main Manchester station were to be had at the far end of the bus station, it turned out. The trip took a little longer than the alleged 15 minutes -- I think it must have taken that long just to get everyone's luggage stowed -- but I reached Picadilly about 10.40. The timetable information there was on electronic boards arranged around an island kiosk, alphabetically by destination. Sheffield, of course, was around the other side -- but as soon as I got there, everything scrolled, and Sheffield was on the far side again. After a couple of iterations of this I determined that there was indeed a train -- a stopping train, but never mind -- leaving from a nearby platform in a few minutes, and boarded it. After that it was just a leisurely ride through the Hope Valley and a long slow taxi journey through Saturday lunchtime traffic, and I was home. The sides of the railway line were colourful with pink rosebay willowherb and yellow ragweed, with patches of meadowsweet here and there and a fine display of himalayan balsalm at one of the stations.

I slept all afternoon, got up for dinner, unpacked, and then set up the new scanner I'd ordered so that I could digitize the photos I have here. It's impressively small and quiet compared to the 2000-vintage one I have in Tucson. I was amused to discover, when I grabbed my scrapbook from my 1990 trip to South Africa, that my well-loved Indian cotton skirt was already around that long ago.