The clouds have been holding their breath, a collective pause that smells of gin and anguish. Air India, a nation’s pride painted in peacock hues, has tumbled from the sky, and yet the chattering classes in their Westminster bunkers have barely blinked. The crash, a fireball of mangled metal and shattered dreams, has been reduced to a footnote in the great British news cycle, sandwiched between a royal corgi’s birthday and a minister’s sprained ankle. I ask you, what has happened to our horror? Have we become so anaesthetised by the endless drip of disaster that we no longer look up, no longer gasp at the heavens’ betrayal?
Let us be clear. The inquiry, that most British of rituals, is being demanded again. A safety review, they cry, as if the problem is a loose bolt on a wheel of cheese. But the real scandal is the silence. The victims, their names barely whispered in the hallowed halls of Westminster, are being airbrushed from history. The families, their grief a raw, open wound, are met with bureaucratic shrugs. ‘We don’t look at the sky any more,’ a source whispers, and I can almost taste the gin-soaked resignation dripping from the parliamentary rafters.
This is not a numbers game. It is not a column inch allocation. It is a moral test, a chance to prove that we still bleed for the dead, that our empathy is not a finite resource reserved for the rich and the pale. The Air India crash, its victims a tapestry of global diaspora, has been quietly sidelined. The aviation review, if it ever materialises, will be a flimsy document, a bureaucratic sop to a public that has forgotten how to be outraged.
But I, Biff Thistlethwaite, will not forget. I will drink to the souls who perished, my glass raised in a tavern of sorrow. I will demand that the inquiry be more than a farce, that it be a howl into the void, a reckoning with our collective indifference. The sky, that vast blue indifference, has betrayed us. But we, the sentient ones, must not betray each other. So raise your glasses, gentlemen, and let the reviews begin. But do not expect me to applaud. Not until the dead are counted, not until their stories are told, not until we look up again and see not just clouds, but ghosts.
