In llama land

I thought that going to see our new office would be the most exciting thing that happened yesterday, so I wrote about it during my lunch break. Foolish, foolish daisy. After lunch I started a new cheque book, which is excitement in excelsis, and at about four o'clock Brian said, 'It's too nice an afternoon to be at work, I'm going for a fly. Do you want to come?'

Forty-five minutes later, we were tootling about above the City by the Sea in Brian's 1944 two-seater plane. There was a slightly worrisome moment when he said, 'I've got to start it manually, so if it starts moving before I get in flick this switch down,' but fortunately that didn't come to pass. We flew east overland, then west home along the crumbling coastal cliffs and found my house (visible by its shiny silver roof among a sea of dark tiles, and by the spreading magnolia tree behind it, with five white flowers dotting the canopy) in the eastern quarter of the city.

Then we went further west to Port Fairy, where a second worrisome moment occurred: after a brief explanation of rolling and pitching and moving the rudder with the foot pedals, Brian said, 'Take the stick and fly us over Julia Percy*. Keep the nose level with the horizon'. So I did. It was more sensitive than driving a car and I very quickly had us flying out to sea and I was quite disturbed by how attractive I found the ocean. It would have been so easy to dive down and plunge into oblivion. Once I had that thought, I decided it was time to tell Brian he could have the controls back. So we did a couple of rolls over Port Fairy, buzzed my uncle B's house and landed.

And then I went home for dinner.




* By which he meant Lady Julia Percy Island, not some random woman.