Flambards Take Flight
Everything about England reminds me of some book, it seems. Flying with Gavin reminds me of Flambards. We fly from a farm, just north of Nantwich outside Church Minshull, first wheeling the plane out of a barn onto a field where the airstrip is mown in the grass. Taking off from the grass runway cut into the pasture adds a touch of the romantic to the flight, even though this visit the cows are gone.
The weather is a bit cloudy as we start, so Gavin decides on the shorter flight to Shobdon. From the air, I get a better impression of the English countryside than from the road, where the views are typically obscured by hedgerows. The Cheshire plain is laid out before us like a child’s playscape, rolling irregularly-shaped fields outlined by hedgerows a deep green, colored in with bright green or hay-gold brown, dotted with toy sheep or cows. Here is the wiggly River Severn. There is the straight flow of the canals populated with narrow canal boats on their holiday trips. We see old farm houses in their enclave of outbuildings which form their own small community. We see the slightly larger villages with a few shops and a post office. We see the even larger market towns, usually with a big square and a church. We fly over stately homes, some turned into bed and breakfasts, over small forests, over meres and fens, over railway lines used and abandoned, over old airstrips decaying since WWII.
We lunch at the Herefordshire Aero Club which is housed in an old Quonset hut, a legacy of the airstrip’s WWII days.
I take the controls some of the way back. I manage to maintain our direction and altitude but updrafts and sinks catch me off guard. Gavin spent many years flying gliders before he got the microlight so he’s like a hawk about them.The day gets clearer and brighter as we head back to the farm. We can see Liverpool Cathedral on the horizon over 35 miles away. Gavin points out, rather pleadingly, that we still have 20 liters of gas left and a good three hours of light.
Yours is not a face I have grown old with and you are no longer pretty to me.
August 25th, 2005 at 10:32 pm“She might have felt more keenly than they deserved the criticisms…which, intended to be acute, were merely flippant. But flippancy takes a graver name when directed against an author by an anonymous writer. We call it then cowardly insolence.”
August 25th, 2005 at 10:37 pm