All's well that ends well"

And suddenly it’s too late; all things will have to wait or remain missed.

It’s too late to get a burger on Queen Anne Hill, to sit outside the coffee shop again in their recycled milk carton, Poly-Wood loungers. No time to have breakfast, lunch, dinner or cocktails at the black and white tiled 5 Spot Regional American Diner. No longer enough time to stroll down to Highland drive and stand on the terrace that looks out over the central city night-lights and West Seattle sea clouds, nor time to stand ankle deep in the chilling pacific and look west to the islands and dream.

I’m sitting on the plane, Lufthansa flight number 491 en route to Frankfurt, Germany and an eventual connection to home. Evening meal has been served, digested and I’ve watched one movie with my daughter – Horton Hears a Who, an animated version of the Dr Seuss story, surprisingly well done.

On the cabin screen now there is a map of our approximate position, just slightly east of the southern tip of Greenland. The map is pleasingly graphic, textbook greens and blues and of course, for Greenland - white. It seems almost to be in 3-D. In front of the symbolised airplane that trails a red line across the surface of the map is the empty blue of the Atlantic Ocean; somewhere in the distance I can see the outline of Britain.

Later we will pass over the Lockerbie memorial where my friend Bill Mack remains, but now we are approaching an area known as the strait of Denmark. Soon we will pass Iceland where my father-in-law died whilst on his own travels aboard a cruise ship tracing its own red line across his un-chartered blue.

We are flying at a height of 35000 feet the distance to destination is 1772 miles and our ground speed is 532 mph. Most of the passengers are asleep; the hostesses are resting my children dreaming. Just now I went to the rear of the plane and opened the shade to look out at the ice passing below but it is night time over the pole; we arrive tomorrow morning.

Everything, the map (which reminds me of school days, explorers and Tin-Tin cartoons of the sixties), the statistics, Frankfurt marked within a diamond, equidistant between Nice and Oslo and the red trace, the stark colours, the names all combine to incite within me a desire to travel.

And yet this is an end, a going home and a parting from friends, family and a place that has been home for two months.
It is also the end of this blog; the challenge laid down by a distant friend has been met, albeit with some degree of interpretation.

Unlike last year’s blog from San Francisco when the alphabet was the substructure there is no X to give me problems.

Yes, Shakespeare and his Titles seemed an impossible thing when it was first proposed but the relief of not having to answer to X outweighed the worry about Anthony and Cleopatra. Although I do not love Seattle in the way I do San Francisco, and find it harder to write inspirationally about, there is a at least a cinema here called The Egyptian.

It was there that a summer of multiple film attendance came to a fitting climax. Juno was the film of the moment, discovered at the first visit to the open-air screenings, seen again at the last and twice on video in-between, a sort of token of our time here. The Dark Knight, the latest Batman was the most impressive, firstly for the actor Heath Ledger’s promiscuously talented portrayal of the Joker and secondly for its resonance in the psyche of the American audience that surrounded me and cheered the end.

The Egyptian would not have been the climax to this celluloid feast if the final film I chose had not been a thriller depicting grisly murder in a French forest; the setting was too close to home and I didn’t want that atmosphere to be something I carried away from a summer in the northwest. As it was the cinema left us with the tale of Philippe Petite’s audacious tight ropewalk across the top of the former Twin Towers of the world trade centre. The film included the same animated “plane across atlas’ graphic that I am enjoying on the cabin screen as I write.

So summer, August, holidays and trip all come to an end. September starts as I land, maybe already has as I write. Krissie remains the other side of the ocean that now separates me and the continent that is her home for another six weeks.

Goodbyes are so hard, so much harder each time.

When I walk through the door at home, I will phone her, she will be about to wake up on a day that will not have almost finished for me and tell her we are home, safe and sound.

As Bill said, “All is well, that ends well.”

Especially when there is no X to worry about.
The End.