Volcano

Last year I was a little upset when the volcano in Iceland erupted: 27 years in England, I'd spent - give or take six months here or there - and there'd been no impressive acts of nature at all. As soon as I was gone: poof! Volcanoes exploding, snow falling, heat waving: God doing as much as he ever does to the weather in Hertfordshire.

To make up for it - to say sorry for giving me no drama - the neighbouring volcano has just erupted. Poof! Just like that. And the first thing I knew about it was Baba screaming through my window.

'Ho-rrreeeeeeeeeeeee,' she was screeching. 'Ho-rrrreeeeeeeee.'
I was in bed, sick and reading my Kindle, so I didn't appreciate all the noise.
'Ho-rrrrrrrreeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee,' Baba shrieked again - and trust me, this lovely, cuddly old lady can shriek like a banshee - so I got out of bed.
'Mmmm?' I said in the international language of stop sodding shrieking at me.
'Look!' she yelled, and then pointed to the sky. At which point I realised that there was no sky, and it was a blanket of ash. Then - priorities firmly established - she pointed at my washing line. 'Take your washing in!' she yelled. 'It's going to get all dirty!'

I got my washing in, and then I went back to bed. Eventually, when I was hungry enough to require getting out of bed, I took myself outside and realised I couldn't see a thing. Not a single thing. The entire air was full of ash. It was all over my scooter, and all over the floor, and all over my face, an inch thick like snow. And - because I'm never prepared for any kind of emergency - I had to drive to the local shop to buy myself dinner: drive through air absolutely solid and grey, breathing through a mask. Thinking as I did so: thank God it's not a real emergency. Because when a real emergency happens, I am going to be totally screwed. All I've got in the freezer is icecream.

It's quite exciting, actually. It's getting thicker and thicker by the hour, and it's absolutely silent outside: the ash has muffled everything. In the six minutes it took me to drive to and from the shop, I managed to collect a coat of greyness so thick that I could - and did - draw patterns in it with my fingers.

'Oh,' the shop assistant said when I was asked him what the hell was going on. 'Just the local volcano erupting.'

Oh, just the local volcano erupting. Which is not a sentence we hear in Hertfordshire all that often.

As disappointed as I was at missing out on the English natural phenomenons, I'm quite certain I've held out for something a little more dramatic. And possibly a little more dangerous: I have no idea how healthy it is to be surrounded by a thick blanket of ash. I didn't give up smoking so that I could breathe a volcano into my lungs.

Whenever you forget you're abroad, there's always something to remind you all over again. A little bit of something you'd never expect in Welwyn Garden City. A little bit of foreign magic.

And as dangerous as it might be, it's also a little bit thrilling.

Poof.