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To paraphrase Amazon….

If you like this blog, you might like this book

We haven’t been out in Charlie for weeks. 

Not long after our trip to Henstridge, Charlie had to go in for a major service, and he’s still there in the maintenance hangar waiting for some parts to come from the US.  Like many imports at the moment, there’s been a delay – whether that’s due to Brexit, boats stuck in the Suez, the wrong paperwork, slowdown in manufacturing, lack of raw materials, lack of machinists, lack of drivers – who knows!

But I’ve not been sitting idle! Charlie’s been the inspiration for a children’s book which is due to be published next July.

A sample illustration of Charlie

Charlie and the Great Move will be the first in a series of books about Charlie Piper and his friends.  This story sees him having to move from a dilapidated hangar to a brand new one, but there’s something lurking in the shadows of his new home…. 

If you want to learn more and perhaps help get Charlie into bookshops and libraries, please visit the Kickstarter page

In the meantime, I hope it won’t be too long before the real Charlie’s out and about again.  We’re hoping to go to Husband’s Bosworth in December which will be a really interesting trip.  We’ve not landed at a gliding club before, so it’ll be another first for us.

Update

The video on Kickstarter has been changed so please take another look and let me know what you think of the new version.

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Where’s my headset?

Now I’m not one to grumble (though Will might disagree!) and I don’t like to complain, but below is a photo from yesterday’s delivery:

A lovely little diary with loads of useful information, and a space where my new headset should be.

When you place an order on a Saturday lunchtime and pay extra for 24-hour express delivery, the expectation is that you’d get it on time. Even if the website did promise ‘Order by 15.00 for same day dispatch!’, we realised that that probably didn’t apply at weekends so paid for speedy delivery to get it by Tuesday lunchtime. Sure enough, the tracking note told us that our purchase had left the warehouse at around 0945 on Monday.

Timing wasn’t an issue. By 9am on the Tuesday (yesterday), the order had been delivered ….. or part of it had, and that was the problem. The postie had handed us a suspiciously small parcel and on opening it, we saw straight away that the headset was missing. Only three of the four items we’d ordered had arrived. The delivery note gave no clue as to why because none of the items listed had been ticked and there were no messages.

So when Will rang to find out where the missing item was, to be told by someone who either didn’t care or was well used to such calls, that ‘we forgot to pack it’, he was almost speechless. The order was for just under £1000 of which the headset made up a significant amount. Where was quality control? Surely they would have looked down the list and thought “Hmm, that box doesn’t look like it’s big enough for a headset”, or “Ooh, four things on the list, three things in the box. Let’s see what’s missing”. It’s not as if it could have been hidden away, nestled discretely underneath everything else.

Will rarely does wrath down the phone, so luckily for the person on the other end, they couldn’t sense the steam coming out of his ears!

Having been promised that it would be sent straight away, all we could do was wait for it to turn up.

And here it is! Delivered this morning.

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On a much cheerier note, after an hour or so up with an instructor and a short solo flight, Will is now signed off and has his currency renewed. Onwards and Upwards!!

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A Fond Farewell

A few days ago, I caught Will sobbing in the corner. Okay I exaggerate, but he did look somewhat downcast. The cause of the gloom which surrounded him was my fault. I’d forwarded him an email from Heathrow Airport and it included a tribute to the Queen of the Skies featuring the last of the British Airways’ 747s to make their way to Kemble. “I haven’t even been on one” he (almost) wailed.

I gently reminded him of the previous two aircraft types we’d waved goodbye to; that we had fond memories of them even though he hadn’t been on those either.

It didn’t help. Turns out that Concorde and the Avro Vulcan had never made it onto the Viable Holiday Destination Travel Options list, so they didn’t count.

Will was a little happier to find out that one of the Jumbos will be preserved as a museum at Cotswold Airport, so a visit has already gone into the virtual diary ready for the announcement that it’s open to the public.

Perhaps in the future we’ll have to plan our holidays not by the destination, but by the means of getting there. That way, we’ll have a good chance of having flown in whatever aircraft next passes its ‘best before’ date.

Featured image: British Airways