SO, the vapour trails are once again arching across the firmament.

The Island’s sunshine total will be consequently reduced, and the overworked descriptions of chaos and nightmare are being packed away in the tabloid newspapers’ ‘scare the people’ locker for further use.

In a world where we can access every event at the touch of an internet key, the first small puff of extra smoke which blew out of Iceland’s fiery volcanic field was probably no more than a blink before it was gone. I doubt anyone outside Iceland had even heard of Eyjafallajokull – let alone be able to spell it.

But who could have foreseen that in the space of a week, it could have led to a paralysis of air travel right across Northern Europe and links to the United States, with more immediate consequences than the horrendous outrage which swooped out of the New York skies on September 11 2001?

While the arguments continue about how the disruption was handled, the overriding message has to be of Man’s classic impotence in the face of Nature. Yet poignant lessons have cascaded through the dust clouds, particularly for a community at risk such as ourselves. The UK too, suddenly became aware of its own island status.

How lucky for us, we are served by robust sea routes. The weather was calm – a factor that, perversely, contributed to the dispersal of the dust cloud – and access to vital mainland suppliers was not affected. But how many more ‘close shaves’ can we shrug off? The expectation that ‘it’ll never happen’ can no longer be tenable.

Yet we continue to go down the path of adopting ‘just-in-time’ strategies for food supplies in place of local storage, while abandoning sustaining manufacturing industries and food production in favour of building concrete mausoleums for financial services prestidigitators to work in and glass and plasterboard hutches on green land for them to live in.

Columnist Peter Rhodes drew a shrewd comparison with swine flu, which both illuminates the dilemma for the authorities faced with assessing risks for a fragile, but unforgiving public and how hindsight rubbishes the prudent. In the aftermath, much criticism was lobbed at the NATS, the body controlling UK air space, for the severity of the caution it adopted, but who’d want to be on the first plane that defied its advice, only to be forced to ditch in the Atlantic?

You might have thought that BA’s previous experience, when one of its airliners lost all power while flying into a volcanic ash cloud over Indonesia in 1982, would have mitigated against their reported release of loaded aircraft across the North Atlantic effectively to ‘bust’ the restrictions on landing at UK airports.

Clearly companies as well as individuals were prompted to take desperate measures. The episode certainly played into the hands of the entrepreneurial ‘Dunkirk Spirit’, with hardy salts crossing the Channel in exposed inflatable ribs to pick up handfuls of brave travellers desperate to get home. When the planes were missing, the boats and trains just had to take the strain. And there were those on the Island who relished the quaint experience of reading the national papers a day late. To many it gave a feeling of really being abroad, emphasised by the unrelenting sunshine.

Obviously there was a miserable downside too. The uncertainty and expense of extra days away. The cost of missed meetings, supplies, schooling. Patients separated from care and medicine. The inflexibility and meanness of insurers, carriers, employers and car park operators. Plus a large dose of moribund institutional thinking. If there is an emergency strategy at all, it should have been summoned into place the minute things went awry – particularly when predictions were that the disruption would be long-lasting. Not for the first time were we presented with ‘operation catch-up’.

The moral and scientific high ground was surrendered with the peremptory lifting of the restrictions, despite assertions that old ‘Eyefull’ was continuing to erupt. Suddenly the measures that were deemed so vital for safety didn’t seem to be so vital any longer. It also sent out a signal that commercial pressure – from the airlines in this case – mattered more than the safety of the humble travellers forking out for the privilege.

Alongside the disregard for the welfare of stranded passengers, reports that food exports were allowed to rot and then thrown away in developing countries where hunger is endemic seemed the most outrageous aspect of the hold-up. Somewhere along the line we really do need to reassess our priorities and needs. It was hard to feel sympathy for South Korean manufacturers bleating they couldn’t dump yet more mobile phones on Western consumers, or China in turmoil over the mountains of cheap tat building up in their warehouses. Please tell me why we should be importing flowers from Kenya?

I certainly don’t go along with the glee brigade, which basked in the absence of aircraft movements over Kew, or the obsession of national radio current affairs programmes anxious to bring silence into our living rooms. Not do I subscribe to the belief that such disruption is good for our collective soul to remind us of our vulnerability. Too many people have been hurt by it unnecessarily. But it is unquestionably a wake-up call.

Pity there isn’t a hovering ash cloud that could interfere with the flight paths, or rather the vocal cacophony of local seagulls – and probably a smattering of Guernsey birds too – that at this time of year plague any residence with the smallest exposed ledge, to set up an illegal squat camp and jam all other frequencies of the early-morning dawn chorus.