On 14 March 2020, I left my house in the Orkney Islands to travel to Edinburgh global airport. I was owing to journey to Germany for a investigate trip. Entire of nervous anticipation, and making frantic final-moment preparations, I hadn’t paid as a great deal consideration to the coronavirus crisis as I may have, but events ended up establishing so immediately across Europe, it was dawning on me that intercontinental vacation may possibly not be an option for significantly longer.

By 5am, as I boarded the ferry, the radio bulletins seemed apocalyptic. On board, travellers sat individually, in their own non-public islands of paranoia. I wore a mask above my nose and mouth, and cleaned my armrests with a little one wipe soaked in Dettol. In the toilets, the ship pitching beneath my ft, I scrubbed my hands for 60 seconds and examined my have reflection. Grey, I thought. Anxious.

4 hours later on, I stopped in at my parents’ spot around Inverness, where I ate some lunch and checked emails on my telephone. I experienced a great deal of them. “Don’t arrive,” just one of my German contacts said, merely. A further had cancelled our conference owing to childcare problems all educational institutions experienced abruptly shut. A hotel regretfully informed me that it would not be ready to honour my scheduling. My flight, nonetheless, was nonetheless scheduled to depart on time.

Far previously mentioned, countless numbers of planes were being however pinballing all over Europe, Asia, Africa, the Americas. They crowded the airspace about London and Amsterdam and Paris, converging from all directions just before spiralling down. They were being launching around oceans with a cannonball momentum weaving cleanly between each individual other in a mannered, balletic dance.

Ordinarily, planes are in regular movement, massing with the daylight but never definitely ceasing, going in predictable designs like currents in excess of the Earth – the invisible infrastructure of the planet. Common routes – these passageways and corridors and elevated motorways by the sky – have grown much more crowded and critical as air vacation has greater in level of popularity about recent decades, much more tightly stitched into the cloth of our lives and the world wide economic system.

Again in 2004, 2 billion passengers boarded flights about the class of a year. By 2019 that…