The Press is of course having a field day: "they took our cash and repaid us with ash," etc etc. The story's origins? The eruption of a volcano that has put paid to all air travel for the passed few days, and which looks likely to continue well into next week.
Inconvenienced, we've all forgotten the impending election, the outrage caused by the British Airways's cabin crew strikes and over-looked the appalling loss of life last week caused by an earthquake in a remote corner of China.
My partner sits in Vienna, colleagues are stranded in Portugal with their families and, in Poland, the funeral of a President has to proceed without most of the world's heads of state as none can fly to Warsaw.
In short: we are all very focussed on how we are being inconvienced by this natural event.
There is though a far greater inconvenience just waiting around the corner to blow our complacency to the four winds: man-made, man-denied, climate change.
Like the denial of the horrific events of the holocaust by people living almost on top of its ovens, we in the West are today blind to the catastrophy we are overseeing with our politics, our consumerism, our fossil carbon burning and excessive consumption. It's somebody else's fault - if it is indeed happening. We are just by-standers. What can we do? we aren't in government. Oh the list goes on.
When I was doing my apprenticeship in horticulture we didn't use peat or peat-based soil mixes; we used John Innes 1, 2 or 3 mixes that we made ourselves by hand. The compost element (aka humus and soil conditioners) were of properly made and screened compost from our own heaps of green waste. Today we have DEFRA and other government departments ringing their hands at the their failure to cut the use by the horticultural trades and public. Ban it! Ban the extraction, the sale and the importation of it and any product tainted by it (Russia is a popular alternative source it seems). Force the industry and gardeners to behave responsibly. Use the current "fad" for Grow Your Own to instill a real awareness of the value of knowing where your food comes from, how much better it tastes if not produced in a factory, and how important it is to do things properly for the sake of our children's and our neighbour's world ...if not our own.
It won't just be a lonely Polar bear being photographed in future: it'll also be the last Inuit Indian and close behind them will be the Western photographer who set out to warn us - but was ignored.
I'm loving the plane-free skies over London: the quiet gives me a chance to hear some of the sirens so easily drowned out by our growing carbon footprint.
