I returned to the UK recently on an overnight flight.   For most of the journey we crossed an invisible globe which lay beneath a solid cloudbase.  Due to the time of year and our flight path,  the rich red hues of the sunset never fully faded and, eventually, moved through the palette into rosy pinks while the twilight shifted imperceptibly from dusk to dawn.  A nightless flight. 

As daylight grew, a fine, bright morning gave us occasional views through now-broken clouds – icy Greenland, boundless sea, rocky Iceland, and eventually the deeply recognisable, domestic cultivation of English fields.  Nearly home. 

I don’t often fly and am acutely aware of how bizarre and remarkable is this achievement of mankind.  I don’t quite get the ecstatic sense that we’ve  ‘slipped the surly bonds of Earth’ – the prosaic nature of seats and seatbelts, uninspiring food and cramped toilets surrounds me too closely.  And of course, I know we are not entirely disconnected.  Air is a physical entity and gravity binds us to the earth even as other forces keep us aloft and moving.  If the engine stalled, we would fall, swifter than Icarus. Nonetheless, I am strongly affected by the sense of detachment which air travel gives from the world beneath.

My sleep-deprived mind was still full of never-to-be-repeated experiences from three weeks in the US and resisted a settled anticipation of return, of picking up the threads of my present life.  Watching the fields and towns slipping past, an uncountable distance below, I found it hard to fix on a single location of home.  Instead, my mind flitted from place to place, as if I could choose my destination in both space and time and return to London, or Hampshire, or Biggin Hill, or even the Lancashire of my childhood.  How strange.  Would I return to a past home simply to relive the same life? Or would I return with the foreknowledge of one pathway, so make different decisions in consequence, forging a new life which diverts from the once-lived past?   From this great height all things looked equally possible.  The problem only seemed to be one of preference. 

All travel is an escape.  It loosens our bonds to place and, by extension, presents an invitation to escape our current selves for a little while.  I remember my son telling me of the first term at university and watching his fellow students arrive and present themselves in new identities, some ideal or experiment they yearned to adopt.  Then, as the weeks went by, he saw their re-inventions wear thin and splinter, their core selves re-emerge.  It’s perhaps both a blessing and a curse, the capacity we have to imagine ourselves ‘other’ – envisage ourselves elsewhere, in different times, places, skin.  We are then liberated yet rootless and untethered.  And the strength of self which draws us back to the here, now, this body and this lived past is also, surely, both our curse and our blessing. 

On my flight, of course, the Captain takes over and we are instructed, restricted, directed.  We land, incontrovertibly, with fast deceleration that swiftly transitions us back into earthbound dimensions.  Identity check, baggage reclaim, customs.  By the time I leave the airport, I am irrevocably back in one place, one time, one identity, and I clamber on the A9 bus to East London. We travel in one direction only and all our choices are from this moment on.