March 17 & 18: Up in the air and The Perpetual Sunrise
The past 25 hours have been predominantly in-flight, sandwiching a hectic Changi stopover. After saying farewell, we stood behind 60 odd Japanese school students and panicked about locks (subsequently bought locks), ate a corn and bean burrito, then moseyed around waiting for the flight. No surprises that I was about to wet myself at last boarding call and we were almost too late to make the flight - their words, but mothers with toddlers were still faffing about and stowing luggage after we were sitting, blanketed and had put my fluffy socks on.
Burrito-eating accessories
Cameron gave me a beautiful, beautiful book to diarise my experiences
Nicholas was hell-bent on cramming as many movies as physically possible into the first 7.5 hour flight. I watched half of Interstellar, waking up intermittently to ask what was going on, which made me turn into a panicky mess at the first sign of turbulence. I watched a few documentaries to help keep me awake. Did you know that there was a point where there was way too much oxygen in the air and insects grew to the size of crocodiles? True story. That's really all I got out of it because I was distracted by the sunset. We had almost three hours of sunset, as we chased it around the globe to Changi.
Changi was hot and sticky. We went upstairs to the sunflower garden, where the air was too sweet but the sunflowers were pretty and glowing in the darkness, so they balanced each other out. We watched the butterflies in cocoons because most of them were sleeping. Some uncurled while we watched (Sophie would've hated it) and their wings were still soft and tissue papery.
By the second flight I was beyond exhausted. I kept falling asleep while eating my baked potatoes and chickpeas. It was my turn to power through films and I watched What We Did On Our Holiday and it was all the good things: David Tennant, viking mythology, the Scottish Highlands and Billy Connolly. 10/10 would recommend. It was pretty funny. The kids were super cute and amazing. When we flew over New Delhi, the sun was beginning to rise. I didn't know how this could be possible, given we still had 6 odd hours until we arrived in London at 6am (when I would presume the sun would be rising). For the following hours, the sun dipped above and below the horizon line as we moved around the globe, glowing different colours over different countries. Over Moscow it was reminiscent of the Dark Side of the Moon cover. Over London it was a pale pinky haze.
The sunrise over Singapore and the sunset over Moscow
Heathrow was busy and I almost cried when the Border Control lady quizzed us about WHY we were spending so much time in the UK and WHY Nicholas was a contractor and WHY he hadn't worked since January. Nobody asked me anything though (thank God).
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