Sky High

We spent a rather odd weekend, The Toyboy Trucker and me - and yes, I know that's not grammatical, but I simply can't go down the "my husband and I" route - and before I get back to the odd weekend can I just add that today's pic was taken by The Toyboy Trucker - balancing on one leg and quivering with anticipation - from a small hand-built tor i.e. haphazard stones piled to hide weeds - on our rockery this time last year... oh,and the only-just-visible-tip of the fir tree is the very same one as Dexter and the pigeons squabbled in in the previous post - so this photo covers a sort of Blog BOGOF, doesn't it?

Anyway, because our house is directly beneath the flight path of two RAF bases and we're both rather fond of planes, we spend a lot of time dashing into the garden and peering excitedly upwards. That's as far as it goes with me, but The Toyboy Trucker - who is, quite frankly, an anorak - then adds something along the lines of "...it's a DB/7/00/89694a/Nortbunger/delta swing-wing" and can usually tell you the number of rivets in the fuselage and where it was built and by whom and when and how many of them there are in the entire world and where they are based and so on and so on and so on... He's been a bit obsessive about planes ever since spending a day and a half flying between Germany and South Africa as a child. I'm more esoteric about my flights of fancy - I'm just impressed and slightly overawed that something the size of Luton and built of tons and tons of metal stays up there...

Sorry, I've digressed - again - well, this weekend there were airshows on at both our local bases, so rather than queue for hours and hours and pay a fortune to stand in a muddy field and be prodded by other plane buffs with halitosis, zoom lenses and step-ladders, we always set up camp in the garden, with a picnic and binoculars. I look forward to this weekend because it means I can forget about being a writer for two whole days (in case anyone important is reading this, I'll be back to the short story and the novel first thing on Monday morning - promise) and wear sunglasses and doze off between ear-splitting overhead turbo-blasts. Sadly, this weekend, as probably everyone knows, the air tattoo at Fairford was cancelled because of the weather. And presumably Brize Norton came out in sympathy because we saw nothing - not a damn thing - in the sky except the usual police helicopter chasing boy-racers down the A34 and several damp sparrows.

However, "just in case", we set up the loungers and the binoculars and the I-Spy Aircraft book and the picnic as usual. The neighbours looked-on in sympathy as we huddled in our cagoules in the driving rain, munching on our egg and cress sandwiches, staring wistfully at a leaden sky. It hasn't dampened our spirits though - oh dear me, no. Next weekend it's Farnborough Airshow and we're sometimes on the flight path for that too, so come hell or high-water, we'll be out in the back garden again come Saturday...