My Month of April – 2017 Edition

Apologies for the lack of posts this month. I haven’t really felt like writing much lately – or rather, I’ve been writing a fair bit for work and lots in my private journals, which hasn’t left much creative energy for blogging. As a consequence, I have loads of posts sitting in my drafts folder that are waiting to be published, so you can expect plenty more as and when I find the inspiration to finish them. In the meantime, here’s what I’ve been up to this month.

True to form, April has been a showery month. The good thing is that you can fly around the showers, and you get great views like these (literally taken a moment apart, one from one side of the aircraft and one from the other).

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My helicopter training officially got underway this month, following my very exciting trial lesson last month. I’m loving the course so far, and I’ve done about five hours now. So far I can just about fly straight and level (harder than it sounds), accelerate, decelerate, climb, descend, turn and hover. I’m learning to fly in the same helicopter I had my trial lesson in, and in another one of the same type. It’s a lot more difficult than I expected, and I’ve been writing loads of notes to aid what I’m learning in the aircraft. I wrote six A4 pages just on the pre-flight aircraft checks!! So there is a LOT to learn, but it’s great to have something really challenging to work towards, and helicopters are just so awesome.

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I’ve also done a few solo flights in the beloved Robin this month, which I’ve enjoyed a lot. I’m trying to do plenty of Robin flying so that I don’t forget how to fly fixed wing aircraft because of all my helicopter training. One day we had to fly down to Thruxton, and we had an amazing view as we transited through RAF Brize Norton on the way. It reminded me of doing my Single Engine Piston rating down there a couple of years ago.

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On the way home we had to fly to Gloucestershire Airport to pick up the Dimona from maintenance. Lee flew the Dimona home and the Robin and I had a bumpy flight back by ourselves.

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Earlier this month I had a day out in London with an old friend from university, which was lovely. She’s been working up in Edinburgh for the last few years, so it was great to have a proper catch-up. We drank Prosecco in the Sky Garden, wandered around Borough Market and explored the atmospheric Dennis Severs’ House (posts on these coming soon).

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Lee and I headed to Paris this month, for a long weekend with some friends who were running the Paris Marathon. We were lucky enough to have temperatures in the mid-20s (not so lucky for the poor marathon runners), so summer dresses and chilled white wine were the order of the day. I’m still in the midst of writing a post on this, so there will be lots more photos coming soon.

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Back home the clematis started flowering, filling the garden with its delicate pink flowers. The wisteria is also nearly out now, and the smell in the garden after a spring shower is divine.

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Everywhere I’ve been there’s been lovely pink blossom. This was a quiet country crossroads in the Cotswolds a week or so ago.

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On the subject of the Cotswolds, my friend Emma and I had a fun day out at the Cotswold Farm Park just before Easter, where we got to bottle-feed lambs and cuddle chicks and rabbits. We picked the wrong week to do this, as school holidays meant that the place was crawling with vile kids, but it was fun nonetheless. The goats were a particular highlight, as was this excellent sheep.

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It was lovely to meet up with my sister and her other half for a nice meal at Whistlers in Chipping Norton, which I can highly recommend. I’m not sure what the bunting was for, but it was irresistible to this Instagram addict.

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Lee was working for the Easter weekend, so we didn’t really do anything special. We did have plenty of Easter eggs though, and I can never resist a Lindt Gold Bunny.

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Finally, the other exciting thing that happened this month was that I got to look after this gorgeous Wiemaraner puppy at home for the day. He’s a little bundle of mischief, but I loved having him around! Isn’t he gorgeous?

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