This morning started off in a bit of a coughing fit. I was 50/50 about weather to cancel this mornings lesson. I was feeling fine, but just coughing everywhere. I had breakfast and coffee, then cleaned up lots of dog shit, then decided to go for it. Easy drive up to Staverton. God, it was busy. Everyone who owned a plane or could get hold of one was up today. It was a really gorgeous day, very low wind with massive visibility. We took off to the south to avoid the queue on the airfield and circled around the edge of Cheltenham. We then went up above cloud layer and looked down which was fantastic. Then we did a couple of auto-rotations from 3,000 feet. Then James said that I was going to do a normal approach, but to give me a bit of a target I had to hit a tiny island, which wasn’t much wider than the helicopter in the middle of a lake. It was great fun, managed the landing no problem, got James to take the controls and took a quick photo:

Took off again and back to the airfield. Spent the rest of the lesson doing circuits, which I’m now getting down to a fine art. Was all great fun and I think I only coughed about twice.

Came back home, walked the dogs and then it was into Stephen Spielberg mode. I set up the video camera, printed out my script and then spent the next three hours filming footage. Won’t say too much about it at the moment, but it involved changing a hell of a lot of t-shirts, a power drill and a Pikachu onesie. Got a load of editing to do on it next, but I think it’s going to be quite fun.

Jamie came home from his Sonic bumming session in Weston and we popped into Tesco’s and then to B&Q to pick up some carpet tiles for the hall. Did the accounts, all the filing. Think I’ll have a quick bath before making myself a killer curry.