A foggy day in London town ...

We've been having the most amazing autumn pea souper fogs. Travelling back from Belfast to London on Sunday night was a little bit hairy. Our flight was delayed by over an hour and a half, and we were lucky to make it out at all. I remember looking at the departures board and seeing that all the Gatwick flights had been cancelled. I thanked the travel gods that I'd opted for Luton: I'd got to get Emi back to London in time for school on Monday morning.

We were shepherded onto the plane as usual, but then they kept us sitting on the tarmac until they were able to get a clear landing slot at Luton. I'm a fairly compact person, vertically challenged some might say, and Emi's small for his age. But we had a giant of a man sitting beside us who was wedged uncomfortably into his space with knees and elbows protruding awkwardly into ours.

Favour Royal Forest Park, County Tyrone ... after the fog had lifted

Then the pilot started to make dark noises about the need to take on extra fuel to give us more options.  More options? I wondered whether he was planning to get around the fog in London by taking us on to Paris ... and what the implications of that would be for the school run the following morning. Or was he planning to corkscrew in the airspace over North London like a demented blue bottle fly, until he annoyed them into giving him a landing slot?

Happily we did eventually land at our chosen airport, where I'd left the car conveniently parked up for a late night drive into town. But the fog! I always think about zombies when it's foggy. I'm not sure why. There must have been a zombie movie way back in my misspent youth that overdid it on the dry-ice fog effects. But Emi agreed that if zombies existed then they'd definitely come out on foggy nights. We watched the cars, which were going so s-l-o-w-l-y ... as though they were being driven by zombies, one mindlessly following the tail-lights of the other through the fog and then we followed them. 

Favour Royal Forest Park, County Tyrone ... after the fog had lifted

It was a slow and painful process getting back into West London, but we didn't get eaten by car-driving zombies and Emi made it to school the next day, which may not have been quite the happy ending he'd been hoping for.

All the best for now,

Bonny x

Listening to Ella and Satchmo: A foggy day