Thursday, August 26, 2021

The cascading impact of great events.


The weather warm, dry and bright.  Sophie's coat starts the day looking almost presentable.


The cafe full of folk enjoying the blue skies. We manage to get a table by the entrance. Sophie is quite oblivious to the people at the other tables. She is concentrating on curly croissant ends.


Afterwards half an hour spent wandering down through the sunflower fields to the stream ... and back.


'The Font' heads off to London. Toulouse airport quiet now that the peak holiday season is past. Parking near departures easy. Presumably this is because the Airbus factory is still on vacation. Security and emigration a doddle. For some reason the BA flight is forty minutes late coming in but the ground staff get it turned around quickly and it's only twenty minutes late at take off. The airline is now operating two flights a day to London. This is up from one but not quite the four a day they used to fly.

Heathrow a zoo. The queue to get into the UK stretching way back into the terminal. Seems a large percentage of the frontier force have been taken and redeployed to deal with the stream of people on Afghan repatriation flights coming into Terminal 4. The government is  hurriedly getting as many flights out of Afghanistan as they can as they're expecting Kabul airport to be closed later today. This leaves regular processing 'short staffed'. A man in a day-glo orange vest  wanders down the line saying that there's a forty five minute wait to have vaccination certificates checked . Thankfully, someone sensible orders  all the passport e-reader stations to be opened. This gets things moving and the wait turns out to be just fifteen minutes, which isn't too bad. When people hear the reason for the hold up the grumbling (largely) ceases. Even distant lives are shaped by the cascading impact of great events . 

Angus and Sophie head off to buy some ice cream. In the store they notice Swedish meatballs. Angus and Sophie will try these at lunchtime.


 

3 comments:

WFT Nobby said...

A reminder of what the Afghan refugees must have gone through to get on on plane to London certainly should make people think twice before grumbling about a few minutes wait.
Hope the meatballs taste good. Somehow I doubt they'll match up to the Font's efforts!
Cheers, Gail.

Lisa in France said...

Hopefully the Font's visit to the dentist will go even more smoothly than her passage through Heathrow. Your photo of the Swedish meatballs reminded me of something - my son is flying back to Ohio tomorrow, and we have been stuffing him full of Japanese delicacies before he goes. We encountered a problem when our local yakitori place (famous for topping off the same pot of sauce every day for more than 70 years) decided to take a summer break. My first thought was that we should check at Picard, as I remember you posting photos of Picard yakitori a couple of times. Alas, no yakitori at Picard Tokyo. It probably would not have been quite the same anyway! My kids also love Swedish meatballs, but those they get from Ikea.

Coppa's girl said...

Sophie is, indeed, looking quite presentable! Why bother with people at other tables, when there are curly croissants to be had? Unless they have curly croissants ends to spare.
It is frustrating waiting in a queue anywhere, but the reason at Heathrow thankfully made most people think before complaining. We should all be aware of how lucky we are....