EVENT HORIZON

ANXIETY MANAGEMENT IS SIMPLE IN THEORY, much harder in practice, though the basics are exactly the same whether it’s opening night on stage, a first date, or the first time you attempt to catch a bullet with your teeth. You just break that thing down into the very basics. Perform a piece you know. Go out for dinner or a movie. Take a bite of something. Make it sound simple, and it loses its power. So today, I’m going to drive a bus up a hill. Which sounds perfectly sensible. There’s a tiny bit of extra risk in this case, mind. Because it’s not a normal bus. And it’s definitely not a normal hill. Ah.

The ‘hill’ in question is Mount Etna here on the east coast of Sicily, and it’s one of the most active volcanos in the world. Something that’s made blatantly obvious by looking up from the coast and seeing the mountaintop quietly smouldering like last night’s campfire. Mountains, as a general rule, are supposed to be reliably dull. They should not be prone to to explode either, but the evidence of my own eyes suggests that Etna doesn’t listen. Glance up from the road out of the town of Catania and the vertical panorama is corrupted; green scarred by a broad swathe of black that cascades down from the top like a dodgy line of code. Etna very much isn’t offline. An active stratovolcano (the conical ones that tend to be more explosive than the more genial shield volcano), it’s the tallest in Europe, has a tendency to randomly spurt molten rock. As a result, the whole thing is actually getting taller. Over a six month period in 2021, Etna layered so much extra molten icing over itself that it actually grew by 30 metres. It smokes more than a 2001 diesel Transit, and the most recent eruption considered ‘major’ was actually in February. Of this year.