What if hot air balloons replaced cars? A terrifying and hilarious thought experiment
‘I’m sorry, I won’t be in the office today because I left home but unfortunately the wind was going in the wrong direction.’
Summer is coming. I know this because as the days get longer and warmer, hot air balloons have started drifting slowly over my house, as they do every year like a tubby early evening migration.
I love seeing hot air balloons – who doesn’t? – but I’m fascinated by their sporadic appearances in the skies above my street. One evening I’ll be sitting in my garden with a golden, mellow sun warming my skin and a gentle breath of a breeze ruffling my hair and suddenly there they are, the portly flying machines floating gently across the gin-clear air beneath a boundless ceiling of blue. But the following evening, in what looks and feels like exactly the same weather, nothing. Not a balloon in sight. Maybe the temperature is a degree or two warmer.
Perhaps the breeze is a puff stronger and coming from a different direction. I can’t say for sure, but it seems pretty obvious that the hot air balloon is a sensitive beast. In fact, it appears to manage the amazing feat of sitting above even horses and helicopters among modes of transport that get spooked and/or rendered useless by certain types of weather. And, while sitting there one evening when the weather apparently wasn’t too hot or humid or windy or wistful, I was watching the balloons when I had a terrible thought: what if humans had forgotten to invent the car and, as a result, the bulbous exclamation mark passing with a muffled roar high over my head was our only way of getting around?
If the hot air balloon was our only means of transport, working from home would have become commonplace long before the events of the last few years. As in: ‘I’m sorry, I can’t come into the office today because it’s very, very slightly too warm.’ Or: ‘I’m sorry, I won’t be in the office today because I left home but unfortunately the wind was going in the wrong direction.’
Maybe it would add some variety to the world of work if you set off in the morning to your job as a loss adjuster only to find a capricious breeze taking you in entirely the wrong direction and depositing you in a totally different workplace. ‘Dear Graham, please accept my resignation from the insurance company as I now work in a bread factory. I hope we can one day work together again, if a strong but not too strong breeze in the correct direction will allow. And I don’t get blown out to sea.’ I suspect that leisure time would also need an adjustment in a world where for some reason hot air balloons are literally our only means of getting around.
‘Hey kids,’ you would say to your children, ‘it’s Saturday. Let’s do something fun.’ But what? Well, the exciting news is, you have no idea. ‘Come on,’ they shout, ‘let’s go swimming!’ And there’s you, an hour later, trying to persuade them that what they really wanted to do was crash land in a remote field near Ipswich or get blown out to sea. Or, worse yet, your planned activity becomes ‘doing nothing’ because the swimming pool is too far to walk to and you can’t get the balloon out because it’s very slightly cloudy.
Planning on visiting friends in another part of the country? Don’t plan too hard, my friend, because that’s not happening during the intended weekend, or indeed month. But look on the bright side, you might set off only to fi nd the breeze has changed slightly and – hey presto! – you’re unexpectedly in Droitwich, you’re now friends with some people you’ve never met before, and you have to live with them for 11 days due to prevailing weather conditions before completely running out of conversation and deciding to set off for home and then inexorably drifting out to sea.
Still, if you didn’t want to spend Christmas with your extended family, this restricted mode of transport would be quite a blessing. ‘Sorry, we can’t come over this year because in a world where we only have hot air balloons the weather is too cold and not windy enough and any attempt to take off will simply result in lurching across the ground in a 45-degree-angle basket, dragging along the tract of land where the M1 has never been.’ Although obviously if you stay home for Christmas, at some point you’re going to need a trip to a big supermarket to get food – unless you’re willing to wait for Ocado to cancel your delivery of groceries for the 19th time because it’s too humid – and setting off for that is going to be fraught with peril, too.
Finally, there’s the dire effect a hot air balloon-only world would have on this magazine. No more handling tests, not unless the wind is perfect, and group tests would become extremely bouncy and dangerous. Also, in honour of the flaky subject matter, it would seem appropriate if the magazine came out only when it felt like it, and perhaps when you least expected it (weather permitting). As for the name, I suspect a re-brand would be in order. To Drifting Out To Sea-vo.
Images are AI-modified versions of shots from the evo library
