So. Hopefully - after hours on the phone, I'll now be on my way to Iowa on Sunday. Technically I'll leave here Saturday night and train across to Manchester and wait through the early hours until my flight leaves (first via Paris CDG) just after 6:00am Sunday. Right now, it all looks good with 95% + of all flights now back in operation, but given recent events I'm not counting on anything until I'm en route to Iowa. Even then I'll be keeping an eye out for mavericky plumes and getting...

After accumulating around 2hrs on a 10p a minute line to Expedia, I tried the old fallback postion of simply hitting the unmentioned '0' at every option and almost instantly got through to someone.  Take that, Mount St Unpronouncable... The news is not great - and as expected, no flights for the next few days at least, though they say conditions are slowly improving ever so slightly (So....I guess BBC, SKY, CNN and NATS are wrong that it's actually getting worse and could last months...)....

On what is, ironically, an absolutely lovely sunny day in Leeds, what really irks is that my long-laid travel plans have actually been scuppered by a smouldering mountain with a name that's halfway between a great hand at Scrablle and a particularly bad Bjork lyric ( Eyjafjallajoekull - say it fast three times). Yes, as some of you know I'm supposed to be flying off to the US early next week - however that's all in flux at the moment due to... and I can't believe I'm actually typing this......

Wow. Is it me or are we all getting just a bit angrier, just a bit more literally outraged, a little less tolerant? Or too tolerant? Or less tolerant at more tolerance or... well... there you are. It's that kind of time. Doesn't it make you want to scream? In recent months there's been a ton of controversies in the press. Some relatively small scale stoies, some decidedly bigger, some totally manufactured, some more organic. But in a lot of cases it feels like rather than the issues being debated,...