I have always had a fascination with flying. In my youth I would build plastic models of aircraft and crash them. In my early teens I decided I would join the RAF when leaving school; only to discover that near-blindness was not an acceptable condition for a fighter pilot. And so I turned to models, and the art of crashing them, again.

My first attempt was a glider. I bought a box containing assorted bits of balsa wood and a paper plan. What I should have done was stuck the pieces of balsa together on top of the plan; thus ensuring that everything was aligned and the flying surfaces were flat. What I actually did was glance at the plan and then stick random pieces of balsa together. The resulting mess should have been named “warp speed”, but not because it was going to be quick. To get the beast into the air required a tow line. What I should have done was to choose a light wind day and then gently coax the fragile mess of balsa and tissue up into the sky. What I actually did was choose a day when a the wind was a danger to shipping and then set off at a run across a field. The result was immediate and messy. The wings folded, broke and fluttered away, and the fuselage plummeted to earth and destroyed itself. Didn’t really matter, it would never have flown properly anyway.

So I bought another one and this time I read the instructions. This one flew perfectly for at least five minutes before I lost sight of it as it headed north over a housing estate.

So I bought radio control gear and more kits, and before long it became an absorbing hobby, and it was mainly the fault of the North York Moors.

I lived in Middlesbrough, which was a bit of an industrial toilet at the time; but just minutes away were the North York Moors; five hundred square miles of gorgeous open countryside, heather and stunning views. It was not a geographic surprise to discover that the moors had hills, and if you stood on top of a hill facing the breeze, threw a glider into the wind, the air coming up the hill would lift the glider skywards.

And so it was that most Sunday mornings found me trudging up a hill to join fellow idiots in the pursuit of slope soaring. When the wind was light, it was relaxing and joyful couple of hours. When the wind was strong, it was a ten minutes of terror before something inevitably went wrong. When the wind was gale force, you loaded your plane with pieces of lead so that it would fly fast enough to penetrate into the wind. The problem came when you wanted to land and you had to fly back over the top of the hill with the wind behind you. Suddenly you were partially in control of piece of wood filled with lead, travelling at slightly less than the speed of sound. Landing the projectile was a challenge, destroying it against a tree was easier. On one memorable morning, a fellow flier was lucky enough to achieve a very soft, albeit high speed, landing courtesy of Tiggles, a dog who happened to be out for a stroll with her owner. To the distress of the owner, Tiggles suffered a broken leg, and my flying friend did not help matters by suggesting that the ruined canopy on his plane was a more serious concern.

Or, more precisely, fizzy wine for she who must be obeyed, although it didn’t look so fizzy when I photographed the remains this morning (she doesn’t drink enough to justify 4,200 baht for a bottle of champagne).

A few months ago I clicked my mouse and bought an Amazon Kindle. It has proved to be an excellent purchase with ludicrously long battery life and a wonderful screen for reading. I also like the way it works with the Kindle app on other devices. Stuck in an endless supermarket adventure with she who must be obeyed, I can start up the Kindle app on my iPhone and it will automatically take me to the latest page I was reading on the Kindle device. When I get home and pick up the Kindle, it will update to reflect the seventy six pages I read while she who must be obeyed was choosing fabric softener. Neat.

Off to Bangkok again for another round of interviews for she who must be obeyed. We have lost count of the number of people she has been required to meet; but yesterday took her fairly close to the top of the management tree, so hopefully we are nearing the end and a job offer will be forthcoming soon.

I would like to think she benefited from my interview advice, which was: don’t get pissed during the interview; but apparently that option never arose. I based this advice on the interview for my job in Bangkok. I met with my potential future boss in an Irish bar in the Hague and the first pint of the interview went very well. By the third Guinness we were both talking bollocks and I suspect I only got the job because he couldn’t remember anything the following morning. A job in Bangkok was highly prized, especially compared to some of the alternatives (Lagos, Sakhalin Island, Lowestoft) and my peers were somewhat miffed that I had got the job merely by turning up and drinking too much. They were even more miffed five years later when my final task was to transfer the company to a new owner, thereby eliminating my job and any chance of a Bangkok assignment. Never mind, I understand Lagos is still an option.

While she who must be obeyed was not getting pissed, I amused myself by going to AV Camera to have the sensor of my GF1 cleaned. After nearly two years and countless lens swaps, the level of crap on the sensor had exceeded the camera’s ability to clean it; so I spent 150 baht to have it cleaned manually.

AV Camera is a treasure trove of stuff I don’t need but desperately want, and it took considerable willpower not to lash out on a G3 and/or a new Olympus lens. But I had to buy something (or so I told myself), and came away with a new strap for my Fuji X100.

Not long ago, Amara Watersports arranged a SUP race on the beach near their club.

Yesterday, they did it again, except this time they took the SUPs onto Jomtien beach and waited to see who wanted to have a paddle. The answer was that all the kids that hang around on the beach were keen to try, plus a few guys who looked suspiciously like Thai national team windsurfers. Massive enthusiasm and after some general messing about…..