Taking Off

I am writing this post retrospectively, as I was too busy to write it at the time. During our last two weeks in England we celebrated Lila's 7th birthday, had Adharanand's brothers and sister-in-law to stay, celebrated a pretend Christmas Day, packed our entire house and moved the contents into my parents' attic, handed back the keys to our landlady, the children had their last day at school for nine months, we moved into my parents' house, celebrated my brother's 40th birthday, packed for six months in Kenya, finished our Christmas shopping, said farewell to friends and family, and watched as the heaviest snowfall in years and arctic conditions closed most of the roads in Devon and grounded most of the flights in Heathrow.

Despite news reports of all flights being cancelled, we thought we should try and make it to the airport just in case ours was one of the handful of flights that got airborne. Our contingency plan was to stay up in London, going back to the airport each day until we finally got on a flight. We set off in convoy, Adharanand and my Mum in one car with Lila and Uma, and Ossian and I in the other with Adharanand's mum and dad. Just getting out of the driveway took 20 minutes. The motorway had snowdrifts across the two outside lanes. The whole way up to Heathrow the news on the radio was warning people not to go to Heathrow, that no planes were taking off and that there were so many people stranded there already that at some terminals there were queues just to get into the building.

We eventually made it up there, walked into the terminal, somehow found an empty check-in desk and asked about our flight to Nairobi. "You can check-in here" was the reply. So within an hour of arriving we had checked-in, said goodbye to our parents and were waiting in the duty-free lounge. We'd arrived at about two o'clock, about five hours before our flight was due to leave, so we had a long wait ahead of us.

Ossian was loving having so much space to run around in, and Lila and Uma spent a long time browsing the Cath Kidson shop. We found some seats near a vast window and watched the night draw in as the snow started to fall again, and our departure time kept being put back. Uma came down with a fever and fell asleep. It was hard to relax, as we watched one cancellation after another, but eventually, at nine thirty in the evening, we were seated on the plane with our seatbelts on, watching the safety video. Other passengers in the airport had told us that even at this point, as they waited on the runway, their flights had been cancelled, just yesterday or the day before. So it was with a mixture of relief and disbelief that we finally took off, bound for Africa.