A good night's sleep, but yet again it hasn't prevented me from being slow thinking and feeling drowsy all morning. I slept in an awkward position as my lower back was painfully stiff. It meant proceeding cautiously all day, consciously correcting my posture to avoid a trapped nerve. Clare went down the Bay to book tickets from WNO's up-coming performance of 'La Boeme' and I cooked lunch.
A fine piece of BBC Radio 4 afternoon drama was broadcast, so tense there was no chance of me dozing in my arm chair after the meal. In 'Welcome to Defiance' a former air traffic controller tells his Nine Eleven story, when all air traffic over America was ordered to land immediately at the nearest airfield following the hijacking and crashing of four planes, with the aim of exposing any other hijacked planes not yet identified. There were 4546 planes in American airspace at the time.
The play re-enacted the dialogue between the control tower at little used Defiance airfield and ten commercial aircraft queuing in the air to land, as it was the nearest landing strip they could reach. The airfield had no radar and relied on visual contact once a pilot requested clearance to make an approach to land. It was fictionalised account of events giving a vivid impression of what it must have been like to be caught up in such a crisis and what it takes to respond successfully in such an unprecedented situation in total reliance on training, discipline and trust in the working partnership between pilots and ground crew.
Late afternoon my head cleared so I went out for an uncomfortable walk around Llandaff Fields in drizzling rain. For once, I didn't complete my daily distance as I didn't want to make too much demand on my stressed back muscles. After supper I watched another episode of 'Marbella' before turning in for the night.
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