A Time of Magic

Probably not but I think that a lot of people will be considering what’s entailed in getting back home should something similar to the Iceland volcano ever happen again.

At the top of their list will be proper insurance. Many people are complaining that the policy which they bought because it was the cheapest available isn’t now providing all the things that those who’d bought “overpriced” policies are entitled to. Those higher priced policies attract those prices largely because they pack a whole lot more into the policy and this time people are finding that some of those seemingly expensive options aren’t nearly as expensive as having to pay for a whole lot of stuff by themselves. To be fair on the people this is a very unusual occurrence and it seems unlikely that the same thing will happen again anytime soon but then insurance is for the unexpected, isn’t it?

Zooming off to places in the middle of nowhere had become commonplace but, as many people are finding, it’s quite difficult and often extremely expensive to get back home from even quite close places. Who’d have thought that people could be stranded in Paris and seemingly unable to get to London? Oddly though other people have managed to get back from Rome which is much farther away so perhaps it’s more down to one’s attitude to adversity than the actual difficulties involved?

Will anyone who hasn’t already booked even consider a holiday involving a plane trip this summer? Somehow I doubt it or at the very least the numbers of people heading off by plane will be well down. Paradoxically, these reduced numbers seem likely to happen at a time when the airlines will be hiking fares up as much as they can to recoup the massive losses that they’ve experienced over the last week. Will the winner in this be the high fares or bargain basement ones aimed at getting bums on seats?

For that matter, which will be the first airline to go bust over this? My money would be on Ryanair as it currently seems that little bit too desperate to pull in money where-ever it can (crazy ideas like charging to use the toilet come from desperate times). Calls for emergency state assistance can’t be far off either with, as usual, Air France at the front of the queue.

The colon is a major chunk of organ within your body and is basically there to finish off the digestion of whatever you’ve eaten. Along with that it produces a couple of vitamins that usually aren’t in anyones diet in anything like the quantity that they’d need to be and, critically, it uses bacteria that reside there to do it.

Which is why you want to be pretty careful when you consider a colon cleanse diet as an option. Some of these can clean you out so thoroughly that the colon takes ages to get back to normal again and during that time you could find yourself needing to take all kinds of dietary supplements to avoid potentially major hassles.

Incoming search terms:

• emkay seo

That’s a question with no easy answer. Last time there was a similar eruption it ran for over a year which isn’t exactly a reassuring precedent.

That was way back in the 1820s though and I suspect that it didn’t make a whole lot of difference to activities within Europe even for those that were aware of it. This time it’s quite different and we find ourselves forced back into the transport technologies of the 1800s once more. Thus the many daytrips made for business and pleasure every day throughout Europe have all been cancelled. No more is it possible to get from London to Prague and back in a day, or at least not for a while anyway.

Out too probably are those relatively long distance holiday flights. For those that haven’t booked already, I suspect that consideration of a week on a Greek island is probably out for this year even if the dust does clear up which I’m sure is less than welcome news in Greece in its current economic woes. As far as the UK goes, I suspect that holidays in France will be the order of the day or at least in parts of France that are relatively easy to get to by car. Some people do drive all the way from England to southern Spain for their holidays every year and there will be more of them but it’s probably safe to say that the numbers going on the cheap flights to the same places will be severely curtailed: it just ain’t viable to drive to t south of Spain and back within the confines of a one week holiday.

If it goes on for the months that seems likely it would be easy to see some travel insurance companies going bankrupt unless they can get out of payments through an “act of God” provision. Will the budget airlines survive at all? They don’t have to pay out for the hotels but they do have to pay out for a lot of operational costs that aren’t easily cut quickly and despite what people may think of the rip-off tactics of, say, Ryanair those tactics are merely a sign that they’ve not been doing overly well economically in this recession: add an extended grounding and it wouldn’t be a big surprise if they didn’t survive.

Holiday cancellations are a shame but Europe has become quite integrated over recent years and it’s business that will be hit quite hard were the grounding period to become quite extended. Clearly holiday companies will be the most obvious ones to feel the pain but many other companies have operations spread across Europe with corresponding meetings requiring air travel on a regular basis. It’s one more blow that we could all do without.