This is emphatically not a Christmas tree that I was intending to feature: it's at Albuquerque airport (note the sweet little airplane on top of it), and I'm on my way back to London, where my father is in hospital, suffering from both a fall (nothing broken, but he was lying on his own for about thirty six hours) and Covid - the relationship between the two, if any, is unknown. So - it already seems a very long journey (one flight to DFW delayed, which would have meant that I missed my connection, so I had to scramble to find another one ...). And I'll offer some understated observations, because as you can imagine, I'm in fact swiveling between a kind of efficient numbness, and incipient hysteria:
i) this is a truly crap week to be traveling to England, given various forms of industrial action affecting both travel and the NHS;
ii) the NHS is in a perilous state - it took 2 hours for an ambulance to come after it was called - and that's relatively speedy - and then my father was on a gurney in a corridor for six hours or so (probably giving everyone covid, in the meantime, since he hadn't yet been tested);
iii) it is utterly surreal traveling for such a reason when it's Christmas week.
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