Greetings from Heathrow Terminal 4! A new adventure starts! Well, I've got as far as the British Airways Lounge, having checked in on the BA175 to New York so, as you'd expect, not much has happened yet. As possible, I'll try to update you as the journey unfolds. The hardest parts were actually getting packed and then leaving my dog, Tai. But, now I'm committed, I'm starting to feel a tinge of anticipation. I'm not really a natural traveller: I have to screw myself up to actually go anywhere but, when I do, I normally arrange a fairly packed programme so that there's no chance of me getting bored. This trip is another round-the-world, mainly Southern hemisphere job, once again heading West.
We are now so blase about long-distance air travel but this kind of journey would not have been possible for my father and would have been incredible to my grandfather. What a shame that mankind's technical mastery of the skies has not been matched in other areas of human endeavour where we seem to learn so little over the centuries. We now have the additional guilt that these very flights are believed by many (but not all) scientists to be destroying our environment. Some years ago, I acquired a small area of woodland and I like to think that the carbon dioxide being absorbed by the crop is "offsetting" the damage my travels may produce.
