Between having to research air-traffic control and natural remedies this book had a big influence on my time! You can read more about my ATC experiences below but I suppose my own experiences with herbs were with the Black Cohosh, which Freya begins to use for her menopausal symptoms.
Like Freya, I was diagnosed with an early menopause. This was a shock because, even though I didn’t want children, I always assumed that it was something I could do. Learning about the menopause meant that it wasn’t a choice any more. And that was disturbing.
I tried HRT for a while but I didn’t want to take it forever. My doctor felt it was necessary at first as I was relatively young and I must say it was great for me. When I stopped taking it, though, I was plunged back into menopausal symptoms which were awful. I think I probably should have been weaned off it gradually.
However, I did find that Black Cohosh was very good in terms of regulating body temperature. It’s known as Squaw Root among American Indians where it was also used for menstrual symptoms, although you should check with your doctor before using it.
http://www.mayoclinic.com/health/black-cohosh/NS_patient-blackcohosh
I’m not a great sleeper at night so I like using a herby spritzer on my pillow. Molton Brown do a lovely one which has essential oils of lavender, bergamot and ylang-ylang. I don’t know if it helps but it’s a nice restful scent. I find that if I’m travelling and I bring it with me, it makes the bed seem more like home and so is definitely more restful.
http://www.moltonbrown.co.uk/candles-and-scent/room-sprays/relaxing-yuan-zhi-sleep-mist.html
This is an article I wrote about air traffic control for the Irish Independent newspaper. My house is on one of the flight paths from Dublin airport which is only 15kms away. So I have a vested interest in the skills of the air traffic controllers in keeping the planes in the right place! I was delighted when I got an email from someone who worked in ATC to tell me that I’d got everything right in the novel.
We were sitting on the plane waiting for our turn to cross the runway when the arriving aircraft thundered down and roared past us. The sound was so loud and the other plane was so close that everyone on board our flight looked a bit anxiously at each other. And I’m pretty sure that the thought going through all our heads at the same time was “I hope that doesn’t happen while we’re halfway across. Does someone, somewhere know exactly where we are right now?”
The answer to that question of course is “yes”. The ground movements controller, up in the control tower at the edge of Dublin airport, knows exactly where every plane in the airport is. Not only the planes, but the fuel tankers, the fire engines and other ground vehicles too. And she (about 30% of controllers are female these days I’m glad to say) is the one who tells them all where to go and when to go there.
I know all this because I spent some time with the air traffic controllers in Dublin airport when I was doing the research for my current novel “Too Good To Be True”. My heroine, shoe-freak Carey Browne, is also an air traffic controller with an approach control rating which basically means looking after those planes that are coming in to land. Carey is used to a life of constant pressure as she watches the radar screen in front of her and juggles planes around as if (as one air traffic controller remarked to me) playing with a real-life video game. He was only half-joking.
There’s a macho element in being able to land as many planes as you can in any given time frame. At Dublin airport, they allow up to around 44 ‘movements’ (arrivals and departures) in an hour. Although – as one controller said nonchalantly between giving a heading change to a European bound flight - they take whatever is thrown at them. Fortunately for all of us who’ll admit to a slight feeling of nervousness as we step onto a plane, and despite the macho words, the key word is safety. In air traffic control they’re always alert for the unexpected.
Like the dog that ran out onto the airfield and made straight for runway two-eight. Runway two-eight is Dublin’s most used runway and – as the wee brown dog raced towards it, watched by anxious eyes in the control tower – there was a queue of planes ready to land and take-off. Those schedules were thrown into disarray as controllers had to instruct an incoming flight to break off it’s approach just as it was about to land and commence a ‘go-around’. I’m sure the passengers on board didn’t appreciate finding themselves back into the air when they’d expected to be on the ground – but it was surely a better result than the outcome of plane meets dog. Meanwhile the ground controller had to instruct the safety vehicles to try and catch the dog, keep departing aircraft in a holding position near the runway, and reposition the arrivals all over again. From the control tower we could see the sudden traffic-jam of aircraft littering the approaches to the runways while the controllers worked briskly to smooth things out again.
There’s no doubt that the control tower is the place to be if you want to get an overview of what goes on in the airport. And, on a fine day, it has some of the most spectacular views in the county too.
But only some of the work goes on in the tower. My character, Carey, worked on approach control, in the radar room which is dark and quieter than you’d think. Here, air traffic control is all about the planes actually in the air and making sure that they’re in the right place at the right time. The thing about dealing with air traffic is that it’s constantly moving. You can’t tell an Airbus to pull over to the side and wait until things quiet down a bit. You’ve got to be able to deal with every situation immediately.
The controllers work in teams and there’s a really strong team spirit among them. After all, they’re passing planes backwards and forwards to each other all the time and so they have to trust each other’s judgment. And although there’s always a built in margin of error, nobody wants to be the one to make it. For an air traffic controller a lapse in judgment that leads to ‘bad control’ is a black mark in their own mind, whether or not anyone ever gets to hear about it. It’s not a job that I could do because I simply can’t see those green blobs on the screen in three dimensions. Quite honestly, all I could see was hundreds of planes over Irish airspace all of which seemed to be heading directly for each other at an alarming rate.
Lilian Cassin, the charming and helpful PRO of the Irish Aviation Authority, the body which employs the air traffic controllers, calmly pointed out to me that they might be heading for each other but that they were at different heights. Aircraft are kept at distances of 5 miles and 1,000 feet apart and everything on the screen I was looking at was just perfect. If anything happens to change that, a loud alarm goes off in the control room. And it scares the life out of you. For instance, if the captain of a flight declares an emergency, the alarm will go off. If two planes are vectored onto a collision course, the alarm will go off. If you let nosey novelists suggest moving a plane somewhere – all hell will break loose.
According to Lilian Cassin, it’s the perfect job. You come in, land the planes, deal with the stray dog or whatever other excitement might happen on the day, and then go home and forget about it. Without doubt there must be an immense satisfaction in doing the job well and it’s definitely a great riposte to the old chat up line of ‘what do you do?’
There’s a good social aspect to being a controller too – although, as the wife of one said wryly – they tend to travel in packs and talk in code. Sitting in the radar room on the control tower, the dialogue between controllers and cockpits is fairly incomprehensible. Most of them admit that they like being in control in their personal lives too. It’s not a job for people with low self-confidence.
Carey, in my book, is an air traffic controller because she lived under the flight path to Dublin airport and wanted to make sure the planes landed in the right place. I’ve always been fascinated by planes, especially since they are sometimes routed past the back window of my home office. I have an interest in making sure that they land in the right place too. Visiting air traffic control has reassured me that they will.
