All flights are cancelled.  The ferries are full.  Eurostar is standing room only. The ancient fire gods of Iceland have spewed their wrath as well as a great deal of ash and steam.  The eruption of the absolutely unpronounceable Eyjafjallajokull volcano has stranded passengers across Northern Europe, but perhaps nowhere more so than on this small island.  Except maybe France, where they’re having a train strike. Quelle surprise.

It’s a strange feeling, being trapped.  I didn’t have any particular place to go.  Wasn’t planning on flying anywhere.  Not expecting anyone to visit in the near future.  I’d have thought I’d felt a bit claustrophobic.  A bit panicky.  Instead, I feel cosy.  No one coming in, no one going out.  That’s fine. We’ve pulled up the drawbridges and everything is settled and secure.  Really I’m just disappointed we haven’t yet had amazing sunsets, perhaps that will come when the ash begins to fall to a certain level in the atmosphere.

Of course, if there’s some kind of major family trauma in the next few days, I’m sure I’d feel differently.  It was hard watching Jen racing against the clock to catch the last flight out of Britain to the US for a death in the family.  I remember my own journey on a similar occasion and can’t imagine how much more difficult it would have been wondering if what (turned out to be) the last fight for days would make the take off window.

But I am currently feeling somewhat isolated.  Isolated by lack of decent broadband.  For a week now, we’ve had slow or no connectivity.  Our browsers are constantly timing out.  We have windows of access and then – blap – nothing.  I’ve been on the phone to BT Broadband twice for considerable periods of time.  It’s lovely speaking to Dinesh or Dimple in the Bangalore call centre or wherever they are, but they haven’t sorted out my problem or even identified what it is. Changing out DSL filters and hubs and rebooting and checking that our computers haven’t been hijacked and sucking up all available bandwidth to make a denial of service attack on some Baltic nation.

I work from home a lot. I manage several online communities.  So I need a good connection. But it’s also my connection to the rest of the world..  I had to scour through and old newspaper to find the name of the volcano.  I would have looked up the names of the old Norse fire gods online in a few clicks. But instead I had to rely on a children’s book I dredged up from the dark recesses of our overburdened bookcases and which referred to them rather un-poetically as the ‘combustible fire giants’.  As opposed to the un-combustible kind, of course.

I can’t share photos I’ve taken recently – of beautiful cherry blossoms and a perfect blue sky or Bill on the slide.  It’s hard to search for pictures of the volcano or see others’ pictures.  When the ashy fog of poor connection occasionally clears, I get updates through Facebook and Twitter feeds.  I’m writing this blog post with only the vaguest hope that I’ll find an oasis of access in a desert of connectivity. (It’s taken me almost two days….the broadband problem has deteriorated.)