View from Vulcan

"Are you doing anything special today, or is it just a normal Saturday?"

asked the chatty young checkout assistant at Sainsbury's in Stroud.

" No, it's not quite normal. For a start, I woke up in a large and beautiful white house with a beautiful white fluffy dog bouncing on the bed...

And then there was the moment when I found myself seated in the pilot's seat of a decommissioned Vulcan nuclear bomber, looking out over a Gloucestershire airfield. No, come to think about it, there's nothing remotely normal about this Saturday, thank you"

CleanSteve rang me last night to tell me about the blipmeet today, about which I had totally forgotten, on account of the dog sitting. I had been engaged in a little OCD-style cleaning of one of the white rooms, so I was glad to hear of an outing.

We got to the Jet Age museum at Staverton airfield, just off the M5, to find a crowd of blippers already assembled. Some had come from as far as the East Midlands or the South Coast! We had time for a quick chat before going off to explore the museum. I opted for a cockpit tour of Trident, the world's first passenger jet engine with the automatic landing system. The very first automatic landing was made in 1964, just one month after my birth. The cockpit we we were sitting in was part of a plane that made her first commercial flight in July 1972, just days after my youngest sister's birth. (After all the literature courses I've done featuring works of the 1930s, 40s and 50s, it's great to find something that happened within my own lifetime!)

I then stuck my head up and saw a ladder and climbed it, and eventually found myself sitting inside a cold war nuclear bomber plane' s cockpit! My co pilot was a young girl of maybe nine years old, who could have no knowledge of the cold war, nor of the Falklands conflict, when Vulcan was actually used ( I don't remember any mention of nuclear bombs being dropped on the Falklands, I really must look that up).

It is probably better not to know of these things. My what -to -do -when -the -four -minute -warning -sounds plan of 1983 involved running a bath and making a cup of hot Ribena! My boyfriend of the time lived about 400 miles away, and I had no illusion about being able to take my doors off and construct a fallout shelter under the table in four minutes!

What a great opportunity, and wonderful to meet some blippers and put faces to names at last! We shall have to return another day, because we did not have nearly enough time. I may also suggest it to our WEA social circle as an outing. Thanks are due to David for organising this blipmeet. It's the first official one I have ever been to.

B, the dog and I had a wonderful sunny and nearly vertical walk around the valleys. That was after CleanSteve had dropped us off and stopped for a spot of lunch. The walk was only about an hour, but we were both exhausted afterwards. The sun was shining so I followed it around the house and garden, trying to find new places to sit or lie. Of course, I could have been writing my novel or radio play, but hey, I was busy doing Logic Puzzles and listening to the radio!