Picture of a Painting of a Picture

All the scanning and viewing of my old slides, including many from my RAF days, made me a little nostalgic today.

I took a photograph of a watercolour painting on my study wall which I commissioned 32 years ago. It was painted from a photograph I took during my time as a Harrier Pilot in Germany.

2 or 3 times a year we would deploy the Harriers from the comfort of our home base airfield into hidden nooks and crannies in fields and roads to practice what was, at that time, our war role, a mixture of very fast and low level visual and photographic reconnaissance across the border into East Germany (as it was), and attack missions delivering weapons various. For a couple of weeks at a time, we flew from fields and roads and this photpgraph was originally taken of one of our aircraft taking off from a narrow, but very much public, road. Traffic was stopped during takeoffs, needless to say. The end of the flight culminated in a vertical landing on a 30m square pad hidden in the trees. Many sites were used but this was one of my favourites.

Alas, the Government decided to disband the Harrier Squadrons earlier this year in Ministry of Defence cut backs, a decision I hope they will not live to regret.