One of my favorite humorists, Australian Richard Glover, has some trenchant (and funny) thoughts on the disruption to air traffic caused by the volcanic eruption of the Eyjafjallajökull glacier in Iceland.
OK, we get it. People in Iceland are perpetually cold. But does that mean they have to take it out on the rest of us? For the past couple of decades, they’ve been doing their best to bring the world to its knees.
First it was the export of Bjork, a woman whose singing pitch causes grand mal seizures among laboratory mice. Then it was the global financial crisis, with Iceland queueing to be the first country to go broke, after a collapse in the futures market for herring.
The Icelandic economy still had its AAA credit rating but the three A’s were henceforth followed by the letters RRRGGGHHH. Suddenly, everyone realised Iceland mainly consisted of ice — a fact, you may think, the Icelanders had disclosed when they named it Iceland.
Still, no one was more surprised than the world’s financial experts — a group of people who were already shocked to discover that unemployed people in the US’s south sometimes found it hard to repay their home loans.
In the aftermath of these revelations, the world demanded that Iceland start paying its way. In response, Icelanders have developed a new export industry: ash.
They are distributing it by air, all over Europe, sourcing it from a volcano, the pronunciation of which is impossible unless the speaker is simultaneously regurgitating fish.
We are reminded that, like Danish, Icelandic is not so much a language as a disease of the throat.
Traditionally, when a volcano went up, the response was to throw in a few virgins to propitiate the gods. Presumably, the world’s airlines tried gathering cabin staff for sacrifice but were stymied when Qantas couldn’t find any virgins.
Ralph Fiennes had been too frequent a flyer.
Given the mounting losses, Richard Branson should now offer himself as the nearest equivalent, a sort of virgin-in-chief.
“We’ve all got to make sacrifices,” he’ll say as he hurls himself into the gaping maw, a final picture opportunity from the king of the genre. Yet, for all the misery it’s caused, there is something faintly educational about this single overenthusiastic volcano and the way it has stopped the world.
The Icelandic volcano is the global equivalent of Friday night acne. It reminds us that, however hard you try, you just can’t control everything. As with the pimple, springing forth minutes before a big night on the town, the only reasonable response is to endure it; to submit to its red, throbbing power. No amount of squeezing or concealing, whingeing or whining, is going to change anything.
And yet, ever since the volcano went up, the whingeing has hardly stopped. It’s difficult to know the planes have stopped, so constant has been the sound of low-level droning.
We have built an economic system on the basis of flying green beans and flowers daily from Kenya to Britain, oysters from Sydney to Berlin and butter from Denmark to Brisbane. Rather than rethink the wisdom of this system, we are instead horrified when it is occasionally interrupted.
We transport millions of holidaymakers from here to there, and there to here, so we all get the experience of ordering identical, global goods from identical, global businesses but with the thrill of paying in a different currency.
We also all get to read the same book — Twilight or The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo — on identical beach loungers in front of identical hotels. The idea that we are momentarily prevented from holidaying in, say, the Czech Republic rather than Terrigal, is enough to reduce us to cries of rage.
One woman from Birmingham told the Herald midweek that she was staggered when informed she might have to wait a fortnight before she could travel home: “I passed out, just fainted, from the sheer shock,” she said.
Really? The news was so unexpected she was rendered unconscious? Is Sydney Airport now like the scene of a Jim Jones massacre — scores of people flat on their back mumbling, “the horror, the horror”?
Personally, I feel like fainting when told that flying is possible: me and 400 people inserted into a metal tube and then hurled into the sky in the expectation we will be served very small packets of peanuts and then land, some hours later, in a different country.
We are perched on the side of this spinning planet; maybe we become delusional due to the constant motion. We end up thinking we can do anything; that nature will always be our uncomplaining partner.
I find myself spluttering with hubristic questions. Can’t we just pour concrete into the volcano? Or blow it up? Or have Bjork sing to it?
Apparently not. We are like ants running around this thing. It’s a power beyond us: a super-sized lava lamp with a missing “off” switch.
As such, the Eyjafjallajokull volcano might have a few things to reveal about the world. First up, the illusion that the world is always under our control.
Peter