IMAGINING A BIPLANE

I stared up into the sky today. The grass was warm and prickly, a carpet of green under the bright blue sky.

There were clouds, thankfully. I can’t look at just blue sky without getting a bit of vertigo, so the white puffs of fluffy cumulus were welcome to my eyes. There were trees too - creeping into the edges of my vision, dark and green and full, and waving in the summer breeze like hands just out of shot.

I was thinking about how much I’d like to go up in a plane.

Ideally, one of those old biplanes made of wood, one that chuffs above old England on days such as these. Or so I imagine. I can hear it now: the engine rasping and the wind whistling past. The throttle purrs as the pilot (not me) banks left and the shadow moves across a sunlit arm.

I’d like to see how small the world looks from up there. This tiny little garden, a patch of green by a white house; roads threading and glinting through the trees, wide open parks with football posts and skateparks, houses and houses with grey roofs and tight narrow gardens, all printed and repeated across the land until they reach the glinting buildings of the city centre, the wide flats of industrial parks or the snaking iron of the railway station. Or perhaps the hills, hazily stacked along the horizon, above the green river of tiny boats and bridges.

I think it would be fun to fly right through one of those clouds too. Sure, the turbulence would bluster the flight, might knock the plane around for a while, and there’d be a cold spray as we pierced through the vapour. But then! We’d puncture the other side and zip out into the sunshine, soaring over those mountains of cloud beneath us, watching them hang there above the patchwork fields like suspended candy floss.

“Jolly good!” cries the pilot above the noise of the engine. I whoop back but of course, he doesn’t hear me. The sun flashes around the sky as the plane turns and we prep ourselves for the rumbled landing.

I’d like that, I think. I can’t make it happen, and today, imagination will have to do. I don’t know anybody with a biplane. So I laid there, very earthbound and very happy in the afternoon sunshine as the quiet clouds floated peacefully and the trees waved so gently.

It’s nice to have these moments.