balancing act
on not flying (and flying), six years on
September 2019 marked a turning point: it was the moment we decided to stop flying. S and I went to Puglia by train - all the way to the southern tip of Italy on a Eurostar to Paris and a sleeper train to Milan and a fast, clean Frecciarossa to Bari, and then a tangle of charming local trains as far as Gallipoli over the days that followed. But we were new to this, and had booked a combination of things which made it impossible to get the train home on the dates we needed to. I have written about it before and I won’t do it again here, but we flew home from Brindisi and it felt bitterly disappointing. We decided, waiting in the rain at Stansted, feeling jilted by the sudden change of scene and temperature, that we were done with flying.
It felt a little like youthful idealism, or naivety, or both, and perhaps it would have been if the pandemic hadn’t swept into our lives six months later. Because for a while, nobody flew. It made it much easier to hold firmly onto not flying when, for the first two years or so, we couldn’t have done it even if we’d wanted to. And once the pandemic faded out of the spotlight and travel became normal again, it felt far easier to say I didn’t fly anymore when I could back it up by saying I hadn’t flown for years.
For a long time I thought I’d make it to five years. Five years flight free, that is: it was a badge of honour, something I genuinely felt proud of and wanted to talk about. But in May 2024 - four years and eight months later - I got on a plane. It was a knotty combination of factors - an important family occasion and an incredible professional opportunity, but also a burning desire to go to Norway, two hours away by plane but two days by land - that made me walk back on the position I thought I held. It wasn’t as easy as I’d thought it would be, to say I simply wouldn’t go.
I cried at Gatwick. I couldn’t remember how it worked: how to check in my suitcase, which screens to look at, how much time things really took. I’d forgotten about the tedium of emptying lotions into little bottles and unpacking into plastic bags; the indignity of waiting to be shouted at. I was scared - I’d always been scared - of turbulence and terrorism and mid-air disasters. But mostly I was ashamed at how much I felt I’d let myself down.
