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 rescued a staffie with separation anxiety. My mum was diagnosed with breast cancer, so holiday money went on going home (on the train) from Edinburgh to London to see her. And the tadpole-sized foetus swilling around my womb in the Maldives turned out to be autistic. The prospect of holidaying abroad became increasingly daunting. How would we manage airport queues? How would my son, who is reliant on routes, cope with us wandering aimlessly around crowded cities? Where the hell would we get the Bird’s Eye chicken dippers he eats for dinner every night?
Meanwhile, it became clear that flying across the planet was fundamentally at odds with saving it. Even so, the predictable chaos ensues at airports as I write, thanks to the killer combo of half-term holidays and the Queen’s platinum jubilee celebrations. I understand the need to get away, especially now, but the fact remains there’s no such thing as sustainable aviation: even a single flight generates more emissions than the average person in dozens of countries around the world produces in a year. In other words, the responsibility falls to countries like ours, and people like us. When a 15-year-old autistic girl called Greta Thunberg started cutting class in 2018 to protest outside the Swedish parliament and said she had long ago stopped flying, it occurred to me that I had too.
I would never say I won’t fly again. Not my style. And immigrants and their descendents fly for different reasons: to return as well as to escape, and to see family. What has been most surprising is how easy not flying is, especially considering my unintentional protest has coincided with one of the worst decades on this island in living memory. Perhaps that is the point. Now is the time to pay attention, not take off for sunnier climes.
So my kids are growing up as I very much did not: like white Scottish children of the 1960s and 1970s. They think a holiday is a bag of chips on a freezing beach and a scratch of their midge bites. It’s amazing how desire ebbs with less gratification, and even I barely miss good weather now. Which is really saying something for an Indian in Scotland. We are at a planetary stage where heat seems ominous rather than a blessing and I no longer want to cruise at high altitudes, releasing vast amounts of carbon into the atmosphere so I can chase the sun. I look back on the late 90s and early 00s, when nabbing a £1 EasyJet flight to Dublin was a badge of honour rather than flygskam (“flight shame”), as I do life pre-pandemic. Not with nostalgia for less turbulent times, but with shock that we lived that way for so long.
Homelands: The History of a Friendship by Chitra Ramaswamy is published by Canongate, £16.99. To order a copy for £14.78, go to guardianbookshop.com
