I did something which filled me with vast and long-lasting pleasure. I’ll go through the sequence. I drew some lines on a chart. I then got into a four-seater single-engined piston-driven propeller low-wing monoplane and took off from White Waltham airfield. I consulted the lines on my chart and set a heading roughly to the west. After about twenty minutes I saw an airfield called Thruxton. I landed there, parked and treated my instructor and our passenger (another student along for the ride) to an ice cream and soft drink.

As we sat outside, I was unaccountably proud of the fact that I had ACTUALLY GONE SOMEWHERE in a plane. I’d taken off from one location and landed at another. And there we sat, in Hampshire, looking out at the racing circuit which surrounds the airfield. Where I’d taken us.

I’ve got something like 28 hours of flying done, and I’ve always take off from White Waltham, flown around and landed back there. There’s something slightly abstract about the world below if you don’t land and experience it. On Sunday 10th August 203 I flew to Silverstone, another race circuit. We orbited overhead, looking down at the familiar (to me, as I’m an F1 fan) circuit layout, and headed home. We’d been there, but we hadn’t, in a way. Landing at Thruxton was just so much better.

One final thing - White Waltham only has grass runways, and the runway I landed on at Thruxton is tarmac. Not only does it look more serious and professional, but when the main wheels touched, they made that cool squeak/chirp noise you hear when airliners land in films. That alone was worth the £10 landing fee.