The skies above Edinburgh were a bright mix of blue and grey this morning, with a gentle wind cooling off a pleasant day. You can’t see the volcanic ash cloud of doom that has washed over — from what I can tell — the entire civilized world, can’t smell it, can’t taste it. But it’s there, hanging over the United Kingdom while grinding life — or some reasonable fascimile of it — to a stop.

Today I was supposed to fly from Edinburgh (from where Nicole and I went on a tour to Loch Ness, where we swam, very briefly, in the frigid water but saw no monster) to Wales, but the flight was grounded lest tiny pieces of ash and gas melt the engine, which would not be good, apparently. It wasn’t a huge deal, of course, because the train heads the same place, albiet more expensive and longer, but still quite nice along the English countryside, rolling green fields and sheep and cows.

It is, naturally, all that most people are talking about here,  jokes and comments peppering cash register conversations, stories of woe making for easy eavesdropping. The newspapers have been unable to resist the references to World War Two (Britons stranded on the the beaches of France; chaos in the air not seen since the days of Hitler), and there is a real sense of panic on the covers of the tabloids. The tourism and airline industries will collapse. Japanese flowers are running low. Some grocery stores have already run out of pineapples. How bad will things become?

I’ve still got five days until I’m due to fly out of here, and predictions aren’t worth much, changing, it seems, by the hour. So I’m going to plug along, tomorrow here in Cardiff, Wales, Wednesday in Bath and Thursday in Avebury and Stonehenge and back to London, and I suppose I’ll deal with the rest when it comes. In the meantime, I’ll have to settle for canned pinapples.