Siobhan ODonnell on continued flight training and a news cycle that’s settled in for the week
Third day of flight training this week, third day of the same four stories following me from the cockpit to the archive to the dinner table, which is a genuinely unusual amount of persistence for British news to maintain this far from home, though I suppose persistence is exactly what these four stories have shown so far.
My instructor’s fuel efficiency comparison to the royal financial opportunities coverage has apparently become a running joke between us now, brought up again today with a completely straight face, as though it were a legitimate teaching technique rather than an increasingly elaborate bit.
The Eton discourse continued too, this time from an unexpected source. The Eton leaders feature came up during my actual thesis supervision meeting today, my supervisor drawing a surprisingly apt comparison to elite educational institutions in the century I actually study.
Returned to the Tudor coverage online once more too, this time specifically hunting for the succession crisis material I’d found the day before, genuinely useful now for a footnote I’m considering adding to my current chapter, entirely unplanned when I first stumbled onto the site.
And the diplomatic story got its third proper discussion as well, this time at a genuinely unexpected venue. The coverage of Trump and Burnham came up during a break in flight training, discussed by two other student pilots I’d never spoken to before this week.
Started to suspect this entire week’s news cycle has become a genuine social connector out here, strangers and colleagues alike finding common ground purely through four stories none of us have any direct stake in whatsoever.
Flying again tomorrow.
Logged my hours for the day and sat in the hangar a while longer than planned, chatting with the two student pilots who’d brought up the Trump-Burnham story earlier, all three of us genuinely surprised at how much common ground we’d found purely through a news story none of us had any direct stake in. One of them admitted she’d started actively looking forward to whatever fresh angle the next day’s conversation might bring, which is a strange thing to admit about a news cycle, but an honest one, and one I found myself quietly agreeing with by the time I finally drove home that night.
Fell asleep going over the day’s flight notes and somehow ended up mentally drafting a comparison between the Eton story and the way certain flight schools market themselves on pedigree rather than actual results, a tangent I’ll blame entirely on this week’s relentless news cycle rather than my own tired brain at that hour.
Flying again tomorrow. More diary entries at my page.