People

I am here with two engineers whose idea of a wild night out is to sit over dinner discussing Thermodynamics and Quantum Mechanics. After a while I politely express my opinion on the subject in hand. They seem surprised, as though I have not been listening, then continue. A while later, I venture another comment. I am ignored.

Bill is the practical engineer and by next week the glider will be re-built to his liking. No EASA nonsense here! He ate an unwise tomato salad in Marrakech and has suffered accordingly. He was fortunate to be dissuaded from taking laxatives and sleeping tablets before bed one evening

Graham is some sort of pointy-headed academic engineer. Inexactitude is not tolerated. He has passed his head cold on to me.

I have promoted them to be contributors and editors to this blog, but am beginning to suspect that neither can read or write. I will gauge reaction to this section later, and let you know. Bill thinks he may have a Gmail account (needed to contribute here) but can’t log on. If anyone has a small child who can explain it to him, Graham and I will be grateful. Also, can anyone tell me what this blog is called, because my Mum wants to read it, and it doesn’t show up on Google?

I have not seen John B. for more than twenty years. We were leaving Enstone, Tibbenham or somewhere after a particularly relaxing one day competition. I remember very clearly him saying emphatically “I’ve had enough of all this, you’ll never see me again”. Not quite true, but he did take a bit of tracking down.

He was kind enough to give me a run round in his beautiful EB28 yesterday. Light breezes, hot and blue. At one point we followed three long ridges at lowish levels in the Dades gorge, none of which worked. I was pleased to note that he became quite thoughtful. Shame I didn’t take a camera, because it was very spectacular. A lot of the erosion here seems to be from wind and sun rather than water, so there are lots of horizontal lines in the cliff and ridge edges. A surprising amount of colour with shades of reds, browns and a bit of green.