FIGHT-OR-FLIGHT KICKS IN

My Mum comes to see me on Thursdays. This week, we were chatting over tea and shortbread biscuits when something huge and quite unexpected happened.

Now then. I often wonder what I’d be like in some great big disaster. You know, normal life one minute, next there’s lava cascading through the kitchen. Or a bomb, or a sudden tidal wave, or some other awful thing you weren’t expecting - swift and sudden and so monstrous you can’t compute what’s happening to you.

My fight-or-flight mechanism kicked in. I’m sure the cups started rattling, though I can’t quite remember the few seconds I had in which to put the mug down and scramble to the open window. My Mum fell silent mid sentence as the noise grew louder.

It was a plane. Or perhaps more than one plane; the sound of several engines rushing and booming through the still summer air. Too close. Louder and louder, and closer and closer, like a thundering waterfall, pounding and screaming in our ears - out of place, wrong, and totally bewildering. I was shaking with adrenaline.

I thought there was going to be a crash. Perhaps any minute we’d be blasted through the air, or blown up, or thrown through piles of collapsing brick and metal.

Then, right overhead like a scene from Top Gun, came the Red Arrows. Boom. One, two, three, four. Five, six, seven! The RAF’s team of aerobatic jets, the very same squad who so often fly over Buckingham Palace, roared over my flat.

I felt like Prince Louis, clutching my hands over my ears. Then, just as quickly, the noisy septet of planes was gone, heading East over the rooftops and under the clouds, and as it turned out, to the Eastbourne Show.

I was still trembling on the windowsill.

And all that for a country show! At the time I wondered whether there’d been some terrible incident in UK airspace - perhaps a Russian plane over the North Sea, or a passenger aircraft above London, not responding to the tower. Why did they have to fly so low?

Come to think of it, I don’t know what good the Red Arrows would be in an emergency. It would be like sending morris dancers into a hostage situation. I guess they could turn on their red, white and blue smoke and loop-the-loop.*

Anyway, they terrified me, I suppose. That unknown, unexpected rush of noise heading straight towards me was so loud. If it had been a hostage situation, I think the kidnappers would have just hidden under the sofa and let the hostages out without a fuss, a hankie, or a ribbon round the maypole.

*I probably ought to point out that I really do think those pilots are extremely well-trained in the same way that the guards outside the palace would be. Our armed forces are the best in the world, and the precision of a parade, whether on land, sea, or in the air, is a ceremonious symbol of high skill, deadly force, and immaculate discipline.