DAYDREAMING THROUGH THE WINDOW

There's a plane soaring diagonally left to right across the window. Up, up, through the blue, leaving a clear vapour trail of two white lines behind its tiny glinting engines.

The plane disappears behind a cloud. The trail lingers on behind it.

There's a cabin crew up there. A drinks trolley is being pushed along a narrow aisle between the reclining seats. Cans of gin and bottles of tonic water, Budweiser, and coke are clinking over the noise of the air filters and engines. A masked crew-member is leaning over and asking a man in a tie whether he wants milk in his cardboard cup of coffee-water. A lady flicks through the glossy pages of the in-flight magazine, and a small kid is tracing the path of the plane on the digital screen with his finger. There beneath his smudgy little print, the miniature yellow plane moves silently across the blanket digital green of Southern England.

Is it hard to imagine that somewhere under those pixels, there's a technical writer sitting in a quiet house with a ticking clock? Is it difficult to picture him looking up through the blue sky at the same thing - a tiny plane leaving a straight line as it jets across the blue sky?

Who knows where that plane is going. North, I think, if I've got my bearings right. Perhaps to Oslo, Stockholm, Scandinavia? Perhaps to pine forests and glaciers and mountains and snow? I'd switch places in a heartbeat.

Of course, international travel is more of an ordeal at the moment. Countries are on red lists, and other places require extensive testing, vaccination passports, a whole load of expense and hassle; travelling anywhere on a plane is probably more stressful than I imagine from my quiet workspace down here. I am (though I choose not to acknowledge it, I suppose) better off staying where I am.

There is though, a burning sense of adventure, a thirst for something new and different. Perhaps it's just the claustrophobia of the season - the result of months of being told we simply can't go anywhere. Perhaps it's more of an indication that something about comfort is uncomfortable, and I'm restless. Or perhaps I'm subconsciously squashing the things I need to concentrate on in the here and now, by dreaming of escaping from them.

Yeah. Let's go with that. That might be why I was daydreaming through the window in the first place.