Flight

"Your minds are too green, I despise all I've seen
You can't stake your lives on a Saviour Machine
I need you flying, and I'll show that dying
Is living beyond reason's sacred dimension of time
I perceive every sign, I can steal every mind."

(*In a belated and rather pompous attempt to honour the late David Bowie, I've decided to name every flight diary entry for the foreseeable future after one of his songs.)

First – where to go? I couldn't face the drive to Wales, and wasn't even sure which site there would be best. So it was Leckhampton or Westbury. Indolence took me to the latter – I can't pretend it was fear of crowding at Lecky (I expected most to get away quickly) or the difficulty of slope landing, as Westbury isn't ideal for that, anyway. And with strong wind forecast, slope landing was unlikely to be necessary.

I've never flown cross-country from Westbury before, but with the corner of Salisbury Plain airspace opened to us (thanks, Nick Somerville of the Avon club), it looked feasible to push out to Westbury town and then head south over Warminster. Soon after I arrived the sky began to look very good, and the first glider to launch went up quickly.

I launched at 1130. My first climb took me back towards the airspace, but it was also easy to climb out front. At 2500 feet ASL, seeing a juicy cloud over the town, I decided it was time to put the plan into action. But I sank badly on my crosswind glide, and found only scraps when I got there. You idiot, I said to myself: you've gone too soon, too low, and too alone. Circling in less than zero, I descended to 800 feet, and wondered whether to land in Westbury and get a taxi back up, or join the pilot of a Delta that I saw landing in a field to the south – he might have a lift arranged.

But the scraps coalesced, and I concluded that fighting to keep going offered better odds than going back to start again. Meanwhile, gliders began to arrive much higher over the town, promising me company if I