A few weeks ago, just as the leader of the supposedly free world was doing his best gameshow host will-he-won’t-he? routine on whether he’d bomb Iran, I was on a plane home from Europe while my partner and our child were mid-air on two other flights.
This felt surreal and dangerously uncertain. International aeroplane travel messes with your head at the best of times, warping the clock and largely cocooning you from earthly happenings. But taking off into that communications black hole with my family in other parts of the air amid atmospherics that seemed decidedly pre-possible global conflagration was especially discombobulating.