Little bag of pretzels

It is a beautiful clear day. I'm in a plane on my way from New York to Vancouver. My faced pressed against the window, I line up its edge with one of the many long straight roads 30 000 ft below and imagine I am down there; hurtling along at 500mph, scorching through the landscape, blowing up a big trail of dust. Sigur Ross is moaning away most satisfactorily through my headphones.

Last time I travelled this far west I wasn't that happy about being so far from home. On my way back I had to stop in Boston, my then business partner and I had a little spare time so we drove up the coast to Portland (Maine, having been in Portland Oregon a few days before). It is just like driving along a bit of UK coast,(I suppose it was part of the UK a billion years ago)and I felt much better with the familiarity of the landscape and the knowledge that I was just a flight across the Atlantic away from home. This time I am aware that in another metal tube, right now, people from home are following me across the sky, four hours behind me, having set off from Heathrow a couple of hours before I left New York.

It's flat out there at the moment, endless oblong fields, stretched out like a picnic blanket, purples, oranges, greens and yellows. There's another of those extremely meandering rivers that appears to have charcoaled a wiggly line on the material. I have been told that when a river meanders it becomes pi times longer than a straight line between the same two points. Sometimes this seems to make sense, other times not.