Trips back in time... a strange summers evening...
As a small antidote to all this cold stuff, foggy mornings, freezing winds that are about at the moment, I'll share with you a pretty much non-story from an evening some years back.
A summers eve in Ipswich. My mate Jon's house up on the hill by the railway line on the north west side of town; the sun's dipping in the sky, bathing the whole area in that brilliant golden evening light. Clear blue skies, hardly any cloud at all and we're out in the garden in deckchairs, drinking beer and enjoying being alive. High in the sky, we can see vapour trails. He wanders into the house to get the big birdwatching telescope, and we settle down to pay these serious attention.
We both know our planes, and indentify what we're looking at as B-52's. American Stratofortress heavy bombers. Three of 'em. At vapour hight, around 30'000 ft, ice visible glistening on the wings. Beautiful. Except it's 1999 and the war in Kosovo's happening. These boys have beeing based at Fairford, in Gloucestershire for a month or so, and are going out on business, loaded for bear. We're looking at heavilly armed aircraft that'll be coming back empty. Somebody still breathing right now is going to die in a few hours time.
It's one thing to see war and death live on CNN. It's another to see it over your back garden, while you watch from a chair with a pint. Would have been a matter of routine for our grandparents of course, look out of the window and there's three hundred armed planes off to do their thing over Germany, with the fighter escort buzzing beneath.
The funny thing was, as we watched them at a distance until we'd had enough, I just returned to my beer and deckchair, entertained for the evening, with just a feeling that I couldn't, and still can't fully identify; maybe that I felt I should be feeling more; that my facination with flying and military jets had brought me to a point where big questions were being asked of me. That to give me my interesting bit of spotting with my mate in this comfort, on this nice evening meant that real explosions would be happening on places that would be filled with real people who wouldn't be getting up again for the repeat on Sky2 an hour later. A little disquietening. But interesting none the less. Maybe FLoH is right, maybe I do just think too much.
Anyway. Enough of that. Back to the cold !
A summers eve in Ipswich. My mate Jon's house up on the hill by the railway line on the north west side of town; the sun's dipping in the sky, bathing the whole area in that brilliant golden evening light. Clear blue skies, hardly any cloud at all and we're out in the garden in deckchairs, drinking beer and enjoying being alive. High in the sky, we can see vapour trails. He wanders into the house to get the big birdwatching telescope, and we settle down to pay these serious attention.
We both know our planes, and indentify what we're looking at as B-52's. American Stratofortress heavy bombers. Three of 'em. At vapour hight, around 30'000 ft, ice visible glistening on the wings. Beautiful. Except it's 1999 and the war in Kosovo's happening. These boys have beeing based at Fairford, in Gloucestershire for a month or so, and are going out on business, loaded for bear. We're looking at heavilly armed aircraft that'll be coming back empty. Somebody still breathing right now is going to die in a few hours time.
It's one thing to see war and death live on CNN. It's another to see it over your back garden, while you watch from a chair with a pint. Would have been a matter of routine for our grandparents of course, look out of the window and there's three hundred armed planes off to do their thing over Germany, with the fighter escort buzzing beneath.
The funny thing was, as we watched them at a distance until we'd had enough, I just returned to my beer and deckchair, entertained for the evening, with just a feeling that I couldn't, and still can't fully identify; maybe that I felt I should be feeling more; that my facination with flying and military jets had brought me to a point where big questions were being asked of me. That to give me my interesting bit of spotting with my mate in this comfort, on this nice evening meant that real explosions would be happening on places that would be filled with real people who wouldn't be getting up again for the repeat on Sky2 an hour later. A little disquietening. But interesting none the less. Maybe FLoH is right, maybe I do just think too much.
Anyway. Enough of that. Back to the cold !
posted by Fred the Singing Bandit at 3:00 pm
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