I’m writing this while sitting in an airport lounge, awaiting a flight currently estimated to arrive one hour and twelve minutes late.

Flighty tells me that, over the last sixty days, this flight has arrived early 84% of the time, and within fifteen minutes of schedule 14% of the time. That’s a 98% ‘success’ rate—and yet here I am, still on the ground.

The last time I took this flight—same number, same route—I was also delayed. I’ve taken it seven times in eight years, once even on the same ‘metal’ I’m catching tonight. Three of those trips were more than fifteen minutes late.

This seems… improbable. Wendy and I have a long-standing theory that we have terrible travel luck. My record on this route seems to support that. But is it really a curse—or just confirmation bias?

Looking wider: of my last 150 flights, 66 were delayed by over 15 minutes. That’s 44%. RyanAir tops my personal leaderboard of shame: 75% of their flights have been late for me, with an average delay of an hour and nineteen minutes. British Airways and KLM share second place, both clocking in at a 45% delay rate.

And that really is extraordinary. Across Europe, roughly 80% of flights arrive on time; some airlines manage 90% or more. RyanAir, ironically, is often cited among the punctual. My personal stats are double the industry average.

So, what’s going on?

One theory: I disproportionately fly in the evenings, when aircraft have had all day to accrue delays. That’s certainly true today—my plane started its morning late out of Schiphol, and it’s been playing catch-up ever since.

The obvious solution is to fly earlier. Except… no one wants to be at the airport at 5am unless they’re being hunted. And besides, this particular flight is always at roughly the same time—and yet I’ve managed to take a 98% reliable service and turn it into a coin toss.

Perhaps I am cursed after all.

The image at the top of this post was generated by DALL·E 3, as you may be able to guess from the weirdly misshapen plane in the background.

Middlesbrough’s Royal Exchange building opened in 1868, and quickly became one of the most important sites for industrial deal-making in England at the heart of the town nicknamed ‘Ironopolis’. A very grand Italianate building, it featured all sorts of intricate stonework and decoration.

It was, however, demolished in 1985 to make way for the much uglier A66. As a sop to the historical importance of the site, some of the twiddly bits of stonework are retained on these little poles in Exchange Square, near the original site of the building.

There’s something distinctly and disturbingly Scarfolk about these metal sculptures of children in North Ormesby, now swallowed up by the surrounding foliage.

It’s less than seven years since Wendy and I wandered along Hollywood Boulevard, comparing it—not entirely favourably—to Blackpool’s promenade.

It’s astonishing, distressing, and tragic to think that, at the time of writing, it’s now in a mandatory evacuation zone due to wildfires. The situation as a whole will doubtless be worse by the time this is published.

Ryan Broderick recently shared the observation that ‘climate change will manifest as a series of disasters viewed through phones with footage that gets closer and closer to where you live until you’re the one filming it.’

LA may be thousands of miles away, but the familiarity makes it feel closer—and perhaps that’s the apt interpretation of the word ‘closer’ for these purposes. It’s hard not to feel a scintilla of guilt about the way that trips like ours might have ultimately contributed to the destruction, just as they contributed to the touristic development of the area in the first place. Flygskam is a complicated emotion.

Hotel room art is often very boring, and never moreso than in a Travelodge or Premier Inn, who seem to buy identical pictures by the tonne.

I enjoy it when hotels try something bolder—even, as in this example, when it’s not quite to my taste. This particular hotel room was painted and furnished in millennial grey, which always gives me slight ‘institution’ vibes. This very bold choice did a lot to offset that impression.

Life needs more whimsy.