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My brother in-law drives us to Duxford Aerodrome, where the great hangers house a B52 Stratofortress, an Avro Lancaster, an English Electric Canberra, a Concorde. But we eye our 1940s Dragon Rapide biplane with circumspection, for it is (weather permitting…and that's worrying for a start!) going to take us to, ( or rather over) London. It looks very small and wobbly. I have brought my opera glasses (not quite Biggles I guess) for our tour of the capital. We check out our six fellow passengers (a bit overweight surely?) There is much Dunkirkian banter with our pilot (I'm a bit worried about that C&A blouson) I am worried too by the camp little man checking the fuel with a calibrated wooden rod thrust into the tanks. Once we have squeezed in I find myself next to the door, which, has been reassuringly made secure by a length of rope.

We totter aloft level out at no very great height and beat our way Londonwards. And this is the nice thing: you never actually approach a city by air when you fly in an airliner; you descend on it from meta space and 20 miles out at town. But here we were churning and chugging our way towards London and actually watching it loom up on the horizon…first (still at a good 35 miles) the Dome; then a tiny but dazzling wedge of light, one of the facets of the Canary Wharf complex. Then at twentyfive miles miles tiny intimations of the great wen begin to click into view: the PO Tower, Tower 42, Euston Tower, until, and slowly the whole city begins to fill itself in, item by item. And suddenly there we are wobbling and lurching in the (surely interdicted?) airspace above the City airport and in the flightpath, surely of planes descending into Heathrow? Well never mind; obviously the pilot knows what's what…(then again…that blouson….)

Anyhow we chunter around over London…spectacular views, of course but's that not really the point, the point is the at we are churning up here in this little bolide and then going to wobble off home again to the provinces leaving this mighty vision untouched, unlanded-on: exquisite aerial foreplay and then enough and Biggles-like back to base. A sweet and improbable memory.

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