There’s something deliciously arrogant about going up in a hot air balloon. I’ve thought about it quite a lot, recently. I think hot air balloons have slightly been haunting me recently (a little more whimsically than the haunted feeling I had yesterday, when a man was following me; I’ve never felt so eerily looked at and visually pierced, and been so unfeasibly well-followed through the streets, though my racing heartbeat, albeit in a crowded place, quickly turned to rage and the content of his garbled words remain a mystery); I have seen them a lot, and not just in the sky.

Imagine the boldness of simply deciding to go upwards and leave all your friends and foes miles below (miles? I really have no sense of how high they go; my understanding of distance is roughly as lacking as my understanding of volume, which during my time spent mixing skincare products in jugs and decanting into containers, has been revealed to be alarmingly off*). You’re not even pretending to fly, or to be in anything particularly technologically robust; you’re just in a thing which floats, bigly, and drifting. You both marvel up there, I imagine, and are marvelled at; it is impossible not to look up when you see a hot air balloon dreaming its way through the sky. I have to admit I had an overly romanticised view of it, though; I thought they would be Continue reading →