Foggy thinking

Here's a new thing for me: fogged in at the airport, plane unable to take off from Sydney for Melbourne because there's no guarantee it can land. What joy to have been given an upgrade to Business (bravo Steven and Gerard at Air Mauritius!) and a pass to the Air NZ lounge here with Bircher muesli, the NZ Woman's Weekly with my Milford Track story in it, and computers. Bliss, really, apart from the delay.

I feel a bit sorry for all the people we initially queued up with at the economy counter, who'll now be milling around in this rather unexciting airport (upgrade in progress) trying to fill in the time and easing from one flat buttock to the other on the nominally-padded chairs. They gave us a taste of what we'll see when we arrive: interesting and attractive ethnic mixes, the African and the Indian, with a French flavour. They looked nice, and the ones we spoke to were nice. (As most people are, of course.)

You remember that Blue Mink song back in the seventies, about the melting pot and the coffee-coloured people? At the time, I was sucked into thinking What a good idea, get rid of racism that way. Then when it was briefly revived in the eighties, I thought Nah! How boring for everyone to be the same, what we need is diversity, we just need to grow up and get a handle on it. And now I'm back to thinking, in my shallow way, Yeah! Because it seems to me that the world's most attractive people are of mixed race. (As an example of the downside of being a purebred, here I would if I could post a photo of Gail Platt from Coronation Street.) I know that historically and worldwide, creole people have had one of the roughest of deals, but now we're in a superficial age when appearance is paramount, maybe their time has come. Anyway, in Mauritius and Reunion Island I'm expecting to get as much aesthetic pleasure from the people as from the landscape.

I don't know how I'm going to go with posts while I'm in Mauritius because the iPhone has been playing me up and, apart from driving me crazy with its capricious ways, may not be very usable over there because I believe wifi isn't going to be widely available. So I'm probably going to have to slot in the photos afterwards.