I believe I can fly - just.

It had been a bit of a weekend, what with a drive-in on Saturday night, and a mystery tour of Bucks on the Sunday thanks to TomTom and Billy Conolly (at one point Billy exhorted us to turn down a bridleway). Monday was work, and on Tuesday I went flying, not the "I tripped over the cat" sort of flying, and not in an aeroplane. For Christmas my brother had bought me four minutes of pain and terror in a vertical wind-tunnel AKA Indoor Skydiving.
OK so "pain and terror" is a bit over the mark, I arrived the designated hour before my flight and then sat for the designated fifteen minutes before anyone else showed up. We then trooped in for the training video where we had 3 minutes of instruction including the panoply of hand signals the instructor (Tim) would thrust in our faces (legs bent, legs straight, chin up [physically not emotionally] and relax), and our only hand signal; get me out of here. Then we had twelve minutes of unashamed advertising. Tim came back in flashed a few hand-signals at us for practice, got a pretty girl to demonstrate the position on a table, and then took us out to put on an oversuit, helmet and goggles.
We all trooped to the wind tunnel to view the group in front of us being manhandled into position and caroming off the side walls. All too soon it was our go:

I stepped through the door and then fell face-forward onto.....nothing! Well I say nothing, what I mean is a column of air whizzing past me at over a hundred miles per hour. Tim, pushed and pulled me until I was in nothing like the position demonstrated by the pretty girl, my back felt like it was about to pop but I was airborne. As we were a small group it was suggested we did tricks, so I decided to do a sedate spin, well I span, hardly sedate, the side wall and I became firm friends, several times. Tim grabbed me and shoved me out of the door, I had two goes (lucky me), so sat and waited for my heart rate to drop before I put it up again. This time I did a stately tour of the upper regions of the windows before (for an extra fiver) Tim took me on a visit to the upper stratosphere to check out the baffle pattern on the ceiling. We had been told to smile, not smiling we were told was a bad thing as your cheeks got pushed into a sort of balcony around your nose which wasn't too attractive ("But soft, what light through yonder window breaks? It is the east, and Nick's nose is the sun"). My pictures reveal that I wasn't smiling (when I can pull a still off the dvd, I'll post it), sadly the amount of, shall we say, spare tissue I have on my face didn't just give me a balcony, more of a sort of loggia I'd have said. I did smile on occasion, when I did, saliva was ripped out of my mouth, to ascend baffleward at 130MPH after a brief excursion round various bits of my face, I decided that hayfever season was probably not the time to do this sort of exercise.

 Afterwards I cycled home, mainly down the canal, now everything hurts!

A Jolly Good Show

It has been the Olympics, in Hemel Hempstead we have had the heavyweight grape disposal event (won by the Mooshta) plus the 4.30 nightmare, clothes gathering event (won by Imo). On the Monday we all went to watch the athletics, it all went swimmingly (if that's not an oxymoron): the taxi arrived, the train arrived, the route to the next train was well-signed, Stan's Cafe had sponsored sets of footprints depicting Olympic golds, that got even the snail Mooshta moving (BTW Tessa, you know that mystery one with the target, paralympic wheelchair stuff, and, Steve I suspect the high jump was paralympic too, hence the one foot), the next train was nearly empty and getting to it made even more entertaining by the man with the megaphone (see my essay on Empowerment by Amplification. J. Pop. Psychol. Tod. V435, NoII, pp1079-1097. May 2015) "Ark,ark,fark,ark,fark fark fark, arkavelin ark fark. Thank You!", entry to the park seamless, entry to the venue seamless, the one way system seamless due to the man with the megaphone (see above), "Madam, am I invisible? Pass the post on the left please!", the performance of Team GB sadly not seamless.
I had Steve to my distant left employing some sort of Preparatory School exhortation, "Come on, chop chop!" and "Put your back into it!" and a gentleman to my right who seemed to have gone to the same school, "Nearly there!" and "Good effort!", halfway through Mooshta fell asleep (probably something to do with the Women's (?) Shot Putt).
Our session finished so we queued for a pasty, which they ran out of when we got to the till, so then we queued for fish and chips. Then we strolled through the wildflower meadows, watched a bit of stuff on the big screen, and called it a day when it went black to the north.
The return journey, was slightly less seamless, the one-way system being twice the distance back as in, in fact at St Pancras we were dispatched all the way to the front of the station before being invited to return to the point where we got off the train via the shops (we were Tessa, I checked it out when I bought the badges). This, combined with the heat, the early start, the poor showing of Team GB's 800m men caused me to fail the Uncle test when the Mooshta came to a grinding halt.
Back at Euston Station, my brother obviously under the delusion that he was talking to (A) Lord Coe (B) someone who cared started to belabour the 20 year old greeters team about the St Pancras route, they nodded sagely, and started looking for a security man to protect them. Tessa intervened by inserting an Indian Restaurant between them and him. When we came out, they'd gone, or maybe they were hiding. Home. Bed/settee. Sleep.


On another note, I see that Tolworth Roundabout is maintained by the "Kingston Youth Offenders Team", what a Council, I'd vote for them, in fact I'd want to be on the team, as I'm sure that everyone my age would. What? Oh apparently it doesn't mean that. Darn!