It is a great English tradition to plan an outing and have grey dreary weather. When you view your photos they are even duller than expected, but you say to yourself ‘I bet those views are great on a sunny day.’ This is a place well worth visiting near one of my favourite cities. How quickly will you work out where you are?
A great cathedral in the distance.
The monthly coffee morning at our little local library is different each time. We never know who might turn up, how many or what we might be doing. Could be a talk, a quiz, scrabble on the table…. This morning there were some new faces including a small, lively elderly lady with a large son. She told us he was an autistic savant and asked which of us knew the day of the week we were born, but don’t say it out loud. Then we each told him our date of birth and he got the day right every time.
How? Was it memory or a mathematical formula. With 52 weeks in a year plus one day, we know our days move by one each year, except for leap years… It only took him a few moments to come up with his answers. I have to admit that one lady gave her daughter’s birth date and he said Tuesday, she said it wasn’t. Asked again he said Tuesday. I asked her what time of day and she said noon, which precluded a date vagueness around midnight… She was a new person we didn’t know; was she telling the truth, perhaps she misremembered…
He also remembered the football match results for any date you named, but unless you are a football fan that is not so interesting. His mother said unfortunately he couldn’t predict future results, only remember past, so winning the football pools was just a dream. Finally she said ‘Okay, he’s done his party trick we’re off now.’ And off he went with his eight library books.
Most of us, if we fly from a busy airport, probably don’t know the make, model and safety record of the plane we are going on. We don’t even see what it looks like on the outside. Perhaps there are apps and websites to go on, I haven’t flown for years so don’t ask me. I certainly know that members of my extended family have flown safely over most continents. If you had access to information that your type of plane often had lose bolts, just like the one whose panel and window fell / was sucked out, at least you could make an informed choice.
Also having a lucky escape were the passengers on the Japanese plane colliding on landing with a small plane which sadly wasn’t so lucky. Do you have trouble finding, doing up and undoing your seat belt when someone offers you a lift in a car you are unfamiliar with? That would be me on the Japanese plane. With my dyspraxic hands I would never get undone in ninety seconds let alone get out, down the chute, film what was happening on my phone and manage not to drop the phone on the way out. Find out the names of the cabin crew and book them for your next flight, they got everyone out safely.
Have you been to a cat café? My Aussie relatives have been on a mega Euro holiday. Having been on husky sleds and met the real Father Christmas, going to a cat café in London was one of the last treats for my great niece. Her aunty booked a table for afternoon tea and it cost £lots, but as cat lovers it was worth it apparently. Coincidentally I had just been down an internet rabbit hole to see what happened to the kitten that didn’t stop growing. Disappointingly it did not turn out to be an albino lion and eat the owner, but an affectionate very large Maine Coon. So I recognised the rather scary, very fluffy cat investigating their scones in the picture that appeared on my phone. Apparently it was not fully grown yet. I think I would rather eat my afternoon tea without a big fluffy cat on the table. At home the relatives’ cats are not allowed out; letting your cat kill the native birds and marsupials of Western Australia is frowned upon.
Ironically they were astonished how many eateries and pubs in England allow dogs in. I guess we have no need for ‘puppy cafes’ as our cafes are already full of dogs.
Have you been on a scary flight?
What is the strangest café you have been in?
If you like aeroplanes, beach life, swimming in the sea, beach huts and sunshine …and people, you might be lucky and enjoy the perfect summer day. The Bournemouth Air Festival usually occurs after the bank holiday weekend and just before the children go back to school for the autumn term, which of course means the weather is guaranteed to suddenly improve. As the festival is held over four days, the chances of sunshine and planes actually taking off are greatly improved. It rained all of August and true to form Thursday 31st August started with torrential downpours.
In the afternoon it ‘brightened up’. Consultation of programme updates indicated nothing was flying all afternoon except the Red Arrows with a low level display at 5.30pm, so there was a mass migration to the cliff top.
The excitement was short lived as they soon flew away.
But the weather improved on Friday…
Though not my photography.
The weekend got sunnier, hotter and busier.
When our family took off for Australia from London Airport ( soon to be called Heathrow ) in 1964 I never imagined I would be returning nine years later, let alone that I would spend years living very near the airport and end up working there.
With perhaps the exception of China, Heathrow must be one of the most continually changing spots of land in the world.
London got its new airport in 1946. The site included the Vicar of Harmondsworth’s back garden, bought for £15,000 by Richard Fairey in 1930 as a site for testing his planes.
The village of Heath Row was bulldozed in 1944, plans were steamrollered through by the plane-mad air minister Harold Balfour. He persuaded Churchill’s War Cabinet in the 1940s that an RAF base was needed on Hounslow Heath, when actually he wanted to push through plans for a post-war civilian airport. An old lady told me years ago that when they saw a few tents going up near their home on the Bath Road they did not think it would make much difference to their lives.
https://www.independent.co.uk/travel/the-history-of-heathrow-2228431.html
In 1964 we walked across the tarmac to the steps and turned to wave to our relatives standing out on a balcony. In the seventies and early eighties you could still stroll on the roof gardens of the Queens building, children could play and plane spotters listened in to their radios.
In one of my many incarnations I was a lounge hostess for eight years either side of the turn of the century. Even since then everywhere I worked has either been demolished or changed completely. But passengers and the 80,000 ( guestimate, but it’s a lot! ) staff who work there are no doubt much the same.
With the children all at senior school it was time for me to leave behind my various pin money jobs and find properly paid part time work. A few hours in the middle of the day, Monday to Friday in the Terminal Three Qantas Lounge seemed perfect for someone who had missed out on the computer revolution; all I had to do apparently was work the coffee machine and put out a few sandwiches and I spoke the same language as the passengers. Two of us just had the morning flight out to Australia to look after. It turned out my senior colleague was a right… not easy to work with, but luckily she spent most of her time talking to the Qantas girls on the desk or to her twin daughters on the phone in the kitchen. The main lounge was Business Class and a select corner was for First Class passengers. There were cheerful Australians often meeting up with friends and British holidaymakers in a good mood. Another great feature of this lounge was the wonderful view of the south runway and Concorde taking off at 11am.
This little oasis of peace and quiet was down a corridor just before The Gates and up a flight of stairs. I don’t like lifts and could see no reason why I would need to use the rackety metal box that was always being repaired. When it was time for passengers to go to their Gate they could choose stairs or lift. One day the Qantas lady asked me to escort a nervous passenger because she was afraid of lifts; so am I wanted to say! Worse was to come. I was asked to fetch the papers… the Australian newspapers just arrived on the in bound flight. It turned out this involved going down in the same lift, but with the magic key which took the lift down to hell, or at least the outside; real airside where planes park; dark concrete undercover places passengers never see. I was petrified I would be stranded there if the lift doors closed… which they did because I had to walk a few feet to reach the bundles of paper. When I returned trembling to the safety of the lounge my colleague said I should never have agreed to do it as it wasn’t our job!
Companies, jobs and uniforms were to change as frequently as the buildings, but I did not know that at the time.
Grand Prix, everyday traffic – noise and pollution, I hate it, bring back the horse.
…but put big fuel guzzling engines up in the skies and I love them, carbon footprints forgotten.
I don’t fly often, perhaps if I did the novelty would wear off, but for me a trip abroad begins the moment the cabin floor starts to slope upwards and the engines blast into full power. A window seat and clear sky provide the fascination of identifying landmarks, but if the plane ascends through heavy cloud cover there is still the fun of being up in a fluffy heaven.
My first ever flight was across the world, when we emigrated to Australia. My novel ‘Quarter Acre Block’ was inspired by our experiences; in that story none of the Palmer family had flown before, but in real life my father had been a flight engineer in WW2. He was determined we would fly rather than sail out. I have flown across the world a few times since then, but perhaps more exciting was my shortest ever trip, flying in a light aircraft from Jandacot, Perth, Western Australia across twelve miles of Indian Ocean to Rottnest Island – real flying.
But mostly I have been on the ground looking up. At Farnborough Air Show, as children, we would marvel as jets flew silently by, followed several moments later by their sound.
Years later, living very near Heathrow Airport, we would spot four planes in the sky at a time coming into land, at night like ‘UFO’ lights. But the aeroplane we never tired of watching or hearing was Concorde. If many Concordes had been built and flown the noise would have been unbearable, but the two flights a day were an event; teachers in local schools would stop talking at eleven a.m., working in an airside passenger lounge with a great view of the runway, we watched her take off like a graceful bird. On winter evenings I would dash out of the kitchen into the garden to see her glowing afterburners soaring up. Alas poor Concorde…
The end of August brings the Bournemouth Air Festival, now in its eleventh year. If you don’t like the noise, are not interested in aeroplanes and live near the cliff top, there is no opting out, unless you go on holiday. Roads are closed, there are diversions, daily routine is disrupted as over a million visitors come over the four days. But this does not affect me. With visitors coming I have no intention of going anywhere except the kitchen, local shops and the sea front.
The longer the journey your visitors have made and especially if it is their first visit to the Air Festival, the more likely it is to rain. But with the festival spread over four days there is always some good flying weather. The cliff tops make ideal viewing and the beach is crowded. You can book a place on board a boat, but if the weather turns rough you are stuck out at sea! There are hospitality tents and deals at cliff top hotels with balconies.
It all starts tomorrow, so in next week’s blog I’ll fill you in on the highlights and weather, with hopefully some photographs.
Times and Tides of a Beachwriter 