From Sunday 11.4.2010 to Thursday 22.4.2010, I used my Twitter account @kajarno to send

• 26 Swedish tweets
• 41 German tweets
• 69 English tweets

(not counting direct replies) of which a clear majority (but not all) were of a volcanic nature.

Most Swedish readers can follow German and English too, and most German readers also follow English. Hence the large number of English tweets and the larger number of German tweets.

Here’s a subset of the English tweets. The dates and times are local (California 9 h different from Munich; Chicago 7 h different).

Thursday 15.4.2010

• 13:12 Kaj Arnö wonders whether LH459 will leave at all MUC-SFO tonight 21:00, and if so, which route #iceland #volcao #ash
• 20:18 Damn, flight was cancelled. #lh #iceland #volcano SFO-MUC LH459 …

Five days of uncertainty, trapped far away from home by an Icelandic volcano, provide plenty of time to think. Here is my attempt at drawing conclusions the day after returning home: partly on a personal level, partly on a general human level, partly on a societal level.

To recap what has happened: Ten minutes before the intended boarding time of LH459 from San Francisco home to Munich, I got an SMS about the flight being cancelled. This was Thursday 15.4.2010 at 20:20. Thereafter I lived in uncertainty in airport hotels, most of the time 40 km south of San Francisco, to finally arrive home five days later than plan on Wednesday 21.4.2010 at 13:00..

Personal conclusion

Conclusion 1: Uncertainty and losing freedom are hard to cope …