I've been helping my Best Pal wade through a million and one medical decisions to do with major surgery she has to have next year. She gets bamboozled by the doctors, so I've been going along to her appointments and taking notes. Which is fine, except two days ago they called her and said they have a cancellation and her operation is... today.

Which is why I'm on an earlier flight home. Hopefully I can be at the hospital when she wakes up. The poor thing is terrified. I managed to hire an Indian crew to take over for the last few days filming at the airline. I've given them explicit instructions, and they're going to do five days filming, so hopefully they will get at least a few bits and bobs we can use. It's also meant I can't go to Beijing to film Francesco giving a talk at a climate change conference, but Lizzie has managed to hire a local crew for that one too. We're beginning to feel like an international film network.

Another good thought from "The Long Emergency", which I finished on the plane:

"If it happens that the human race doesn't make it, then the fact that we were here once will not be altered, that once upon a time we peopled this astonishing blue planet, and wondered intelligently at everything about it and the other things who lived here with us on it, and that we celebrated the beauty of it in music and art, architecture, literature and dance, and that there were times when we approached something godlike in our abilities and aspirations. We emerged out of depthless mystery and back into mystery we returned, and in the end the mystery is all there is".

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