A plea

I must confess to feeling rather flat at the moment. Maybe it's because I'm back in work so soon after Christmas, maybe it's because it's been absolutely Baltic up here for the entirety of recent memory, maybe it's because there's almost no snow at the resort I am supposed to be skiing at in late January, or maybe it's because I've had the same cold all week (most of Aberdeen seems to be afflicted with this particular plague). Whatever it is, it's certainly left me rather short of motivation & inspiration.

Either way, my mind has been wandering to warmer climes, and I've started looking for a job in Australia (although I am glad that I'm not there right now - I couldn't bear their collective cricket smugness). Plenty going in my trade, it would seem. But then the carbon conscience kicked in.

If we are to even half believe what we read, air travel is the asbestos lining of the gloomily grey global warming cloud. Flying should be avoided like, well, asbestos. Yet I've just book two sets of flights to London in March for a wedding & stag at which I am best man, I am flying to the Pyrenees for my skiing holiday and then over to Texas for a training course the following week. Surely my wife & I flying to Australia, a few folk coming out to visit us, plus the odd trip home leaves me (in the eyes of the Daily Mail) on a similar moral footing to Hannibal Lecter?

OK, I could get the train to London (7.5hrs). I quite like trains, but that one is more than double the price of the flight.... Any thoughts on that one, Gordon? The ski train is a reasonable alternative, sortof, but I really don't fancy heading down under over land & sea. That would mean going through France, and you don't want to start me on that one.

So, in order to sleep at night should we all be trying to cut out air travel? Maybe I'm being selfish, but I can't believe it does. We've progressed too far to have to take a step back like that - surely we are intelligent enough to think of something better? I don't want to bang on about nuclear fusion again, but there must be something else...

C'mon people. THINK.