Tag Archives: microlight

A Dream with an Unlikely Plot

I normally find dreams difficult to remember, and find most of them, including my own, to be incomprehensible and dull.

On the other hand, I need a subject to write about before going to work and packing 3,000 sixpences. It’s going to be a tedious morning and I may not feel like posting after a morning sorting obsolete small change.

Last night, having already slept for five hours in the afternoon/evening, I went to bed and slept deeply again. This wasn’t unexpected as I still have the last stages of a cold, have spent two nights from the last four sitting up until 4 am wrestling poetry submissions into shape, and got up earlier than was ideal yesterday.

The dream started with me in the middle of the action, eavesdropping on Nigel Farage on the eve of his wedding in a Scottish Castle, as he outlined his cunning plan to usurp the British Royal Family using the pedigree of his new wife (who was, it seems, connected to royalty in the distant past).

As plots go, it has a few holes, as I’m not sure what Farage’s current marital status is, how succession to the royal family works and, more importantly, how you go about usurping something.

I’m guessing, with his political history, that he’d take whatever steps were needed to marry, that the lady must have been of Stuart stock, and that you don’t just go down to Buckingham Palace, knock on the door and tell the House of Windsor to sling their hooks. There would, I assume be a protocol to usurpation, which Farage, being privately educated, and having worked in the City, would know about. Otherwise there would be a definite danger that Prince Harry, egged on by his grandfather, would take a horsewhip to the oily oik and cut his dreams of grandeur down to size.

Jacobites have never done well in their attempts to retrieve the throne.

The second part of this unlikely dream centred round my attempts to buy a compass late at night in the Scottish Highlands, pinning most of my hopes on finding a late night TESCO. I’m fairly sure that late night superstores are thin on the ground in the Highlands.

I needed the compass, and a torch, in order to navigate a microlight through the night to London to alert the Royal Family to the danger they were in.

Yes, I realise there are holes in this plot too, including the danger, when knocking on the door of Buckingham Palace with my warning, of Prince Harry etc…

I’m also pretty sure, as I write, that this dream is loosely based on a John Buchan novel.

Why, you may ask, would you need a compass when a mobile phone holds enough technology to land me on the moon, not just London? That’s similar to a plot point in Iron Sky, though I would like to point out I’ve never actually seen it, just read about it.

Anyway, even if I had a compass, and access to a microlight, why would they send a fat man who is scared of heights on an important mission like that.

Come to think of it, why not just phone and tell people.

It’s a good thing I woke up, as there was obviously going to be a point where the whole thing just became very silly.

Microlight over Sandsend

Sandsend – an Old-Fashioned Resort

We went to Sandsend last Saturday. If you aren’t familiar with it, it’s an old-fashioned sort of place just north of Whitby, with a couple of cafes, some car parks, hotels, toilets and probably some pubs (though I’ve never really noticed as I’m usually too busy looking at the road and avoiding caravans). It also has a small river, cliffs, a great beach and wonderful views.

Yes,I know what you are thinking, as a reviewer of travel destinations I leave something to be desired.

It wasn’t originally part of the plan, but Whitby had been rammed with cars when we tried to find a parking space so we drove north. That’s the problem with travelling to the coast on the first nice Saturday in Spring – everyone else decides to do the same thing. We’d known that when we set off, and the queues around York (which seems to be at least 50% retail outlets these days) had confirmed the presence of large numbers of cars.

We weren’t able to get into the cafe by the beach, where I used to eat Yorkshire Curd tart. We haven’t been for a few years, and the cafe has been done up, so they might not even serve curd tart any more. That’s the trouble with time – you look back at something you used to do regularly and find it was ten years ago. I like curd tart, but as with liver and bread and butter pudding, which I also like,  I find out I can live without it for years at a time.

It’s not that I go short of food (far from it!) but there’s so much food and so little time.

People were fishing from one of the car parks, which seemed a good way of securing a supply of fresh fish, though experience with a rod suggests it’s actually a good way of wasting a day. Even without fish, it’s a good way to get out into the open air.

There seemed to be a camera club about, as small groups of people with cameras were wandering about taking pictures of an ancient mounting block. I took photographs of Herring Gulls, Starlings and Pied Wagtails on the chimney pots of the hotel. Each to his own I suppose.

Finally, there was a microlight that flew across the bay a couple of times, even landing on the beach after the first pass, which seemed a bit dangerous. The engine note had sounded a bit ropey as he approached, but I’m not sure why he needed to land as he didn’t seem to have any time to fix anything whilst on the ground. Maybe he just wanted to expose beach users to heavy machinery and a moving propellor.

After ice creams we looped back to Whitby, but I’ll leave that until later.