Resisting the Down-to-Earth

The world below is green punctured by vast islands of grey. This is England from the perspective of clouds and sparrows, the familiarity of my home made strange by different angles and a miracle playing with my DNA. I’ve been soaring for hours, enjoying topsy-turvy freedom and photo-bombing a young couple’s romantic hot air balloon ride. I’ve never told anyone this, I guess because it sounds a little silly, but I’ve always wanted to fly, ever since I first saw Christopher Reeve catch that helicopter in the first Superman movie. I’m far less dutiful now I’ve been blessed with the power. I called into work pretending to be sick, even as I tried to play with a lone magpie on his own territory. The birds must be getting freaked out if they think we’re even able to trespass all the way up here.

It’s all thanks to the latest pandemic to dance across the globe, its symptoms including a government falling as a journalist suddenly finds she can read the mind of a president, London Fashion Week thrown into chaos as its clothes, along their models, suddenly become invisible. There’s no rhyme or reason to any of this, other than occasional outbreaks of pure irony; the conspiracy theories are rife, fuelled by the discovery that whatever-this-is lasts exactly 24 hours, no more, no less, but once the initial fear and confusion passed, most of us learned to enjoy it; if some strange virus is going to rage across the planet, then by all means let it be one that lets me fly, if only for a day.

I’ve flown before, of course, knees pushed against a snoring hulk in front of me, the promise of a glorious overview of a rolling planet trapped behind relentless plexiglass. This is something else; it would be easy to make a lazy comparison with Google Earth, but that doesn’t work in practice. What cheap metaphors lack is life – I can feel the damp of water droplets as the edge of clouds soak into my clothes, air currents roaring in my ears, and beneath my Doc Martens and several hundred feet of air I can see steam rising from industrial chimneys and the stop-start, stop-start of the M6 at rush hour. Maps and photos don’t move, don’t breathe, lacking the dimension of time and movement that turns knowledge into experience.

Well, a limited experience at least. I can stay up here for a few more hours, but that doesn’t press pause on the world. Earth still turns, exerting its gravity, and somewhere among that sea of concrete and roofs is a hospital and pipes, nurses and time running out.

I put those thoughts aside, push against nothing and rise further. I’ll never be able to do this again, based on the latest reports, so I fly northwards. At first I think this is random, until I see the huge half-sphere of the Jodrell Bank Radio Telescope emerging in the distance. Its appearance shocks me, not because I’m anything even approaching an astrophysicist, but because I remember Dad taking me here when I was a kid, looking around the visitor centre and the exhibits, spending a long drive home talking about space and flight and aliens and the occupants of a UFO who had once allegedly stolen mince pies from a lady who lived just a few miles from our home. It’s a happy memory, growing in intensity as I circle the dome. I think about landing, or at least standing on top of the telescope, but I don’t want to cause any damage and I force myself to remember that my day-gift is flight, not time travel. My Dad isn’t down there with an eight-year-old nerd, he’s lying in an NHS bed, wired up and ventilated.

I should be down there. I should be down there, not reminiscing and taking obligatory selfies outside first-storey offices and penthouses. Guilt wells up once again, guilt that I’m running away, guilt that I’m not making the most of this precious gift. Dad wouldn’t want me to squander this, I’m sure, and that makes me feel a little better, but that hope is betrayed by the thought that I could also be squandering the moments we have left. The slipping-away could happen any moment and I’ve never been known for good timing.

But if this flight is a rebellion against the laws of physics, maybe there’s another brief opportunity to fight back, however pointlessly, to rage against the dying of the light with an act of petty but anomalous vandalism. I dig into my thick woollen coat, excavating the detritus of my pockets and pulling out a sharpie. And there, in the sky above Cheshire, I write my initials on this monument to science, my initials, Dad’s initials, the date of that long-ago visit.

We were here, once, and though we’ll never be here again, I’ll leave some trace that we once passed through. The sharpie lid clicks back into its place and I start back towards home, towards that-which-is-to-come, and as the miracle’s time draws to a close, I can’t think of anything else but the beauty of flight and the tears drawn from my cheeks to become a part of the clouds.