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.

Don’t talk to me about fame. Seriously, don’t talk to me. I don’t want to know. I’ve seen a few famous people, and I know a few things about them. All true.

Ian Botham was once unafraid to lean on the door handle of a small candle shop to remove either chewing gum or dogshit with a twig from the bottom of his leather shoe. He held the long silver door handle and there were people inside the shop waiting for him to finish so they could get out. There were people waiting to get in the shop, too. Or they might have been after an autograph from Beefy, and were waiting until he’d finished his shoe-cleaning. I could see his scalp through his hair.

An Italian friend of mine, Roberto Manero, really looks up to Carol Smillie. I seem to recall that Sophia Loren also had a wide mouth and wonder if Italians like that. But Bobbo really looks up to her, instead of just fancying her. We found out that it’s because she can sew.

Patricia Routledge waved at me with unnecessary vigour outside Bath’s Theatre Royal once. She mistook me for a fan because I looked at her. To this day I wonder if she was waving at people behind me. There was no-one behind me. Perhaps she’s teetering on the edge of mental illness.

Arnold Schwarzenegger was at the British Grand Prix on 20th July. It’s funny to think of the Terminator standing around in Northamptonshire, quite near Towcester.

I like Reece Witherspoon. She has a lovely pointy chin that makes her look sort of zingy and feisty. But Christ, hasn’t she got a name Charles Dickens would have been embarrassed to use? Then again, give a pretty girl an ugly name and that name soon starts to be pretty. Gorgeous girls have a zone of gorgeousness around then. Everything in it is gorgeous as well. Look at a foxy girl’s mobile phone. Even though it’s the same model and colour as, say, a scummy bearded man’s, the girl’s phone will be more gorgeous. The same goes for where they sit and what they eat.

Drive in and out of Hascombe near Godalming a few different ways and you’re guaranteed to be driving in the same space driven through by Chris and Billie Evans at other times prior to you. And when you’re gone, they’ll be driving through those self-same spaces again. Unless they move house.

When Mollie Sugden is asleep, she looks like someone pretending to be asleep by remaining upright and very lightly closing their eyes. I think this might be a way of combatting sleep-walking. I bet Mollie used to sleepwalk during those troubled teen years. Probably once Donald Sugden, her father, found her fast asleep in the family Humber. The engine was running and a picnic was packed and sat beside her on the back seat. Yeah, I reckon that’s what happened. I saw Mollie sleeping in the first class cabin of a British Airways 747 from Heathrow to Delhi. You wouldn’t equate Mollie Sugden with India. I didn’t. I still don’t. Perhaps she never got off the plane.