In Cheshire I had a load of ash type stuff appear on my car.

I understood that the general understanding now is that there was an ash cloud, but the tolerance levels for the amount of ash has increased after more research was found that it did not do any damage to the planes.

I also saw the documentary about BA009 - yes really quite scary and understandable that there was the airspace closure based on that. The main query for me being the fact that that happened really very closely to the volcano. Would the ash cloud several hundreds of miles away from the volcano have the same effect? We now assume no, but just imagine what the papers would of been like had a plane suffered an engine failure or worse.