Have been off work ill the past couple of days and forced to work in our dining room. For some, working from home is a panacea but without having a separate study to hide away in it’s a mixed blessing for me.
What has struck me though is the sound of (relative) silence. The kids are still on their Easter holidays, so they bump around and occasionally flare up in arguments or paddies, but on the whole there are very few distractions around me.
What has made this even more apparent is the lack of air traffic this week. Thanks to the volcanic eruption in Iceland, all flights have been grounded until the air is clear enough for planes to fly without fear of engine malfunction.
When we lived in London the sound of trans-Atlantic jets overhead was common-place and so frequent that you automatically shut out the noise. Though the planes were relatively low (we were under one of the stacking areas for Heathrow) you didn’t really notice them.
Now that we’ve moved to the country the few planes that we do see are very high and fairly infrequent and so when you hear them you actually look up to find them. But their uncommonness (if there is such a word) hasn’t dimmed the realisation that *something* is missing. There’s something about the world that sounds wrong. All I can hear (Children aside) are the birds in the garden.
The sky is blue, the air is clear and there’s not a cloud plane in the sky.
Photo credit: BBC