Just a few brief things I never got around to mentioning about my trip to Manchester:

• Walking home one night I passed an old lady who looked at me and said “Piss off!” with more than a little conviction.

• More than once I saw a guy riding a vespa up and down Oxford road on a Vespa with about ten rear-view mirrors mounted on either side.

• At the Waterstone’s bookstore on St. Ann’s square there were several copies of both novels by my friend Dave. Each had a beautiful cover, different than the American editions. The Coffee Trader was displayed somewhat prominently in the historical fiction section of the store.

• The lamposts in the park in front of my bed and breakfast featured such political stickers as “Don’t attack Iraq. No war but class war.” and “No muggers or burglars. This is a working-class neighborhood. Don’t steal from your own.”

• A rather large flock of pigeons was loitering in the park every morning as I walked through on my way to the library. One morning they all launched into flight just a few feet off the ground, took a slow, graceful turn towards me, and for a few seconds I was surrounded by them. It created the strange sensation of being in flight myself.

Without a blog, I’m not sure I would have noted all of these details. Lately, I find myself “blogging in my head,” to quote Liz Lawley, working to file experiences away in my brain for write-up later. I like the way it seems to make me more attentive to the here-and-now, even as I cast my mind forward to what I might write about in the near future.

Back home in KC, now. Typically, the time change in this direction is easier to adjust to than the time change going the other way. Yesterday, L and I spent some time in the little park at the City Market, watching robins tend to their nests, and then later had a great dinner on the patio at the Thai Place in Westport. I went to bed at a normal hour, all signs pointing to a successful temporal readjustment.

One thing I didn’t think of, though. I woke up last night at around 2, which would have been 8 in Manchester, with a caffeine headache.

I have been with L for 11 years today.

Woo-hoo!

Sitting in the Atlanta airport on Sunday, May 25, waiting to board my flight to Manchester, I wrote the following entry, but never got around to posting it:

I have flown literally a couple of hundred thousand miles in my life. And I know how planes fly; I used to be an aerospace engineering major. The faster air travels, the more pressure it exerts. The top of a wing is curved while the bottom is straight. The air passing by the wing on the bottom goes faster than the air on top. More pressure is applied to the bottom of the wing than to the top, raising the plane into the air. Or maybe it’s the other way around. Hmmm, now I’m not sure. There’s a reason why I stopped being an aerospace engineering student and became an English major.

However, as I sit here in the Atlanta airport looking at the plane that is surely way too small to take me all the way across the Atlantic, I am thinking that in the end the confidence that allows all of us to get onto this multi-ton chunk of metal and extremely flammable liquid comes from a massive, willing suspension of disbelief.

Plus maybe a cocktail or two.

Somewhere over northeastern Canada, about to fly over Quebec. Gin and tonic at 35,000 feet, 535 miles per hour with a 25mph headwind, -70 degrees Fahrenheit outside the cabin. After three failed attempts to show us movies — Catch Me If You Can, The Recruit, and How to Lose a Guy in Ten Days, each of which plagued by what appeared to be VCR tracking problems — Delta has decided to show us instead the flight data that has become de rigeur during airline trips. You get altitude, travelling speed, headwind, temperature. You also get a computer generated map with an icon representing the plane at the head of a red line representing your flightpath so far. An interesting example of “re-purposing” data that has certainly always been available to the pilots.

What does Delta think the appeal of this data is for the passengers? A friend once told me that he heard Benedict Anderson describe maps as an attempt to view the world from God’s point of view. Is that what the monitors are showing us? Interestingly, it’s not a view or a representation of the ground from the plane, but a view from well above the plane, enabling a kind of dislocation as we imagine ourselves out of body, out of cabin, somewhere in space, perhaps. From the plane, the view out the window is beautiful but somewhat generic: fluffy white clouds below with hints of the land underneath, sunny blue sky above. We could be almost anywhere, a dislocation that is only strengthened by the feeling of timelessness that comes with crossing so many time zones. By contrast, the digitally mapped representation on the monitor locates us firmly on, or above, the globe.

Composed on the plane about 11:00 a.m. EST, June 8. Posted on June 9.