It was strange how right it felt, like we had turned a corner and started building the world we wanted. In the mornings Claire and I opened up the back doors to birdsong and the beautiful sound of absence from altitude. It was like a different sky, a bigger sky above us. Someone wrote to Claire saying that looking at the sky now was like looking at the sky in old landscape paintings. Inside me I felt myself willing the ash cloud on, seismic solace - if this just continued 2 years say - Europe would have to change how it operated, and then we might never go back. On the weekend, we checked the time of sundown and rushed up to Parliament Hill - and I don't know if the colours were really any different, but the skies were, and we weren't the only ones who had chosen to find out. I had personally give up flying four years ago, but I was still so connected to this air-freighted existence. My brother was in Germany with work, my parents in the USA on holiday, one friend vacationing in Crete, two more teaching briefly in Croatia, work colleagues in Mumbai and Japan. Still I didn't want flights to resume - let friends and family find the opportunity for adventure. Each extension of the no-fly time issued through the news - each 0100 to each 0700 to 1900 and round to another day's 0100 held open a portal to this zone of quiet. But we felt the temporariness painfully, like a holiday these days would end, and eventually the news was of air space opening. That first evening I watched a single red taillight in the sky. The next day sat at my workdesk I looked out the window and saw a contrail streaming out the back of a silver jet, look! a plane, I said. A novelty, but instantly I saw another contrail, and another, and more planes to-ing and fro-ing from Gatwick, Heathrow, Stansted and who knows where. Business as usual. It was hard for the heart not to fall.