 It is now 22 days since that phone call from Miles Hilton-Barber, just 20 days since the hurried exit from England, and 11 days since I returned home from Cyprus.
I am beginning to wonder about all my rage on the flight.
The fact is, Richard Meredith-Hardy is on the threshold of India, barely a quarter way into a terrific adventure with Miles Hilton-Barber, and he wouldn’t be there unless Storm Smith had walked out.
I have had my own wonderful adventure. Would that have happened if Storm had not ratted at Miles?
Why was I so furious with Storm?
As reaction comes in about how the early part of this epic flight went, I find myself being praised for something any red-blooded microlight pilot would have jumped at. I was lucky in that I could find the circumstances in my life where I was able to put aside everything else and get stuck in. Richard was almost in the same circumstance, except for his daughter’s O-levels; my children are way past that stage in life. I hope I would have had the good manners to make the decision he made, had our roles been reversed.
But there has been a transformation in my personal situation. The last time I went to the edge, as it were, was in 2001, trying to fly the Atlantic. That was six years ago. It could be argued that I was getting rusty, and such skills as I had were beyond their sell-buy date. I want to race a microlight across the USA, for example, coast to coast in under 24 hours, chasing the ghost of the great Jimmy Doolittle; the seven days I had with the ‘Seeing is Believing’ trike make my qualifications up to date. Who could argue now – not that anyone has yet, except me – that I am not at least up for the challenge?
I should be grateful, not rude to Storm.
I think much of the fury on the flight came from my habitual doubts about myself, and my own qualities. Before all the big wheezes I have been involved in, such is my imagination that I ‘die’ a thousand times over every day for months before I set out on the adventure. These ‘deaths’ wake me nightly, and I struggle to overcome them. By the time the actual adventure has begun, I am, in effect, rather bored with dying. As the dangers loom, I tend to feel I have been there before and they didn’t kill me then, so they’re not going to kill me now. There was a distinct feeling like that near Pescara on day four of this month’s flight. I had been there over the Atlantic in 1998, and won through.
This time, though, because of the speed of events, I had had no time to practice ‘dying’, because I was in the air before I knew where I was, with a jovial and wholly innocent Miles Hilton-Barber in the back. I had no time to contemplate the risks, just throw myself at them. Every time there was a radio fault – it is mounted in the trike in such a way that rain gets to it easily – and absent Storm got an ear-full for walking off with his radio. It was my radio at risk, or Jay Madhvani’s, both untested on that trike, therefore causing delays. I can argue that I may have made Athens a day earlier by re-fuelling at Corfu and punting on, had I not had the radio delays at Brindisi that meant our final departure was too late in the day for a double-jump.
So I am telling myself, be grateful to Storm Smith.
Obviously, never rely on him, but he must be coming to that lesson himself.
I don’t need to compound it for him.
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