Now, more than ever, I understand the need to get away from it all – so why don’t I miss flying?

theguardian.com:

I haven’t been on a plane for a decade – since 2012, which would be nice to look back on as a halcyon time, if only to run screaming from the blazing fuselage of the present for a second. But the truth is, Boris Johnson was already mayor of London, and it was one of the 10 warmest years on record. That September, the Arctic sea ice shrank to its lowest extent recorded. The climate emergency was happening. It just hadn’t been declared yet.

That summer of 2012, also on record as the last time I felt strange stirrings known as national pride, I watched the opening ceremony of the London Olympics in the basement of a Krakow bar. Four months later, days after discovering I was pregnant with my first child, I took two long-haul flights and a sea plane to a new luxury resort in the most undiscovered part of the Maldives. For four nights. On a press trip.

I know. You hate me. I hate me too. But I was a young(ish) journalist at a Scottish newspaper, with freedom of movement (remember that?) and no responsibilities (or so I thought). A perk of a job otherwise mired in frozen salaries, redundancy rounds and nose-diving morale was free press trips to places I, and most people, would never otherwise be able to go. So I flew regularly. For work, but also to India to see relatives, and somewhere warm for an annual holiday. I was lucky, I knew it, and seized the day, although the day was already way too warm and polluted.

I would love to say something seismic shifted in me on that Maldivian atoll. That I encountered the so-called “untouched” coral reefs off that scythe of white sand and saw the light. But major changes tend to be precipitated by a drip-drip of incremental ones. I stopped flying for all sorts of reasons.

My partner and I