Mike's Flying

Yesterday I had my hair cut, more than cut in fact, chopped comes closer. That may not sound like a particularly significant step, but those who know me will realise that it is in fact as much out of character as my reading anything by Jilly Cooper, drinking beer or overlooking the misuse of an apostrophe (I hasten to add that cutting off my hair will not lead to changes in any of those other areas).

I have the left over pony-tail in a bag, I don’t really know what to do with it. It is both rather cool and slightly wierd at the same time. Ideas?

However, what I have discovered is that this is all a lot of rubbish. All in all being on separate sides of Europe more or less sucks. My particular gripe though is that thing with the goodbyes. It is my contention that train stations and airports (see how cleverly I brought that round to aeroplane-y matters?), ought to have more consideration for people like me.

My experience of the liminal romance of railway stations began a long time ago. A long-ago boyfriend lived in the next grubby little fen town along from Peterborough and so I used to be forever getting the train. Now while Peterborough station is almost proverbially ugly, March train station is enchantingly pretty, all fancy Victorian brickwork and ornate metal accessories. There was only about a train an hour and so I could indulge my aesthetic and romantic sensibilities to my heart’s content.

It was with some optimism then that I approached the idea of starting at Cambridge, leaving Mike behind in Peterborough. I would make devoted treks to the station once a week to meet him, I would be there waiting on the station, and when he left I would stand on the platform until the train disappeared. However, to my disgust, the reality turned out to be quite different. Cambridge, along with a number of other larger stations has installed London-underground style ticket barriers to prevent the ticketless getting anywhere near trains. Instead of my imagined vision, I was instead waiting in the middle of a heaving crowd of hassled people trying to get through the bottleneck to catch their train, and I defy anyone to perform a satisfactory greeting or goodbye under those circumstances. The barriers were forever breaking anyway, and required several guards to man them and all in all only served to make people grumpy. I have had a lot of leisure to observe them in action and I think that they are awful. The train operators have quite misunderstood what trains are supposed to be about. They are clearly philistines and should learn from either little country stations or the redevelopment of St Pancreas in London.

But compared to the airport designers, the train operators are positively sensitive. At the airport, instead of watching the plane disappear into the sky, you can, under the suspicious eye of a security guard, tearfully watch your beloved wind their way through the zig-zag barriers of the security queue nervously removing their belt and jacket. You will be positioned next to a soulless Accessorise outlet, or perhaps one of those WHSmiths that exclusively sell celebrity biographies and irritating books by Jeremy Clarkson, and the security guard will probably be wearing a grubby fluorescent jacket; airports are profoundly unaesthetic. You get odd looks from passers by, as though outside security is hardly the place for such behaviour and you have to leave with the frustrating knowledge that the plane doesn’t leave for at least another hour and a half. Everything about saying goodbye at airports is all wrong. Something should be done. Forget all this security palaver, what about a bit more romance and concern for aesthetics?

Study.

I venture that it’s a dangerously obscure term.

Take for example how I spent a portion of last night (I make no excuses). I spent a good hour building myself a model glider out of Paper and sellotape. Technically I class this as ‘study’, seeing as I was taking care of such things as the angle of incidence, thrust/drag coupling, center of gravity position and the wing dihedral in an attempt to make the thing fairly stable.

Needless to say the craft was a failure. One is limited in ones prowess with a pair of blunt scissors and packaging tape, and little to no knowledge  of the specific aerodynamic challanges facing a model aircraft. Mark 1 of the Mike Flyer how hangs from the ceiling of my room as a reminder of how not to build such things.

I digress. Study is what I’m turning my mind to over the next few weeks. Given that we’ve only 4 weeks of work left before we start the study-leave before our mock exams. Then it’s a week of no classes, a week of mock exams, then a week of no classes and then a week of our JAR exams. The big ones.

The school has developed many facilities to help us through these exams, the instructors are very happy to discuss any problems or points requiring clarification. We have access to something called ‘Feedback’ which is just a coined term for ‘Past Papers’, which are old JAA exam questions. This is especially good because when the nice men set these exams they only deign to add a few new questions every sitting, in theory it’s possible to pass just by memorising all the previously asked questions. Indeed, the nice people down at Bristol Flying school keep an up to date database of all the questions and will allow you access to it for three months for the miserly sum of £50. If you choose to do it that way you’re basically paying £50 to guarantee your passing the JAR exams.

Of course, this ‘Bristoling’ (as it has become known here) isn’t admired by the airlines, and so a healthy working knowledge of any given subject is usually tested at interview.

All in all, I’m going to have an interesting few weeks as we rush to complete the Meteorology syllabus and slowly forget what we’ve learnt in our (recently completed) Radio Navigation lessons.

So until next time, Mk2 of the Mike Flyer is due it’s first flight test.

Last night the Principal and Fellows of my college “requested the pleasure of my company to dine at High Table”, which sounds an awful lot better than it really is to be honest.  The poor old principal and fellows work their way through the entire popluation of Newnham, subject by subject, every year. You all dress up in your gowns (which are voluminous and seemingly designed to make the dangling of sleeves in sauces inevitable), stand awkardly about in the Senior Common Room for half an hour trying to find something to talk about (Classicists get lumped together with other minority humanity subjects-theology, history of art and anglo-saxon, norse and celtic) and wondering whether maybe you should have some sherry just to give you something to do with your hands, and then you all troupe into Hall (and Clough Hall at Newnham is really lovely-google it), listen to the Principal gabble her way through a latin grace and then gratefully sink into your seats, having, hopefully secured a place next to someone interesting. The food is alright, nothing to get excited about usually, and they have a distressing tendency to try very hard to make it sound and look better than it really is by excessive aplication of french names and decorative pieces of salad. I myself got a very large and indigestible piece of something green and stringy along with my sea-bass last night.

After dinner, the inimitable Mary Beard, who is one of the few classicists that other people have heard of as well as being a Fellow at Newnham (check out her blog/column for the Times Literary Supplement), proposed a little wine reception accompanied by a short lecture on Roman jokes (to give the whole thing an air of intellectual legitimacy). She was, I think, a little disappointed at our inability to drink as much wine as she anticipated, however, it really made what would otherwise have been a rather awkward and mediocre evening.

We all go to great lengths to mock, in self-depricating tones, the silly rituals of college life, however, I suspect that that is really because we all secretly love it.

After some consideration, and some discussion I’ve made a decision.

As part of a drive to update the site more often, Andrena will now be blogging alongside me on mikesflying.com (ok, ok, mainly it’s to blackmail me into posting more often, but shussh! :p)

All her posts can be found under the ‘Andrena’ Category.

Enjoy!

PS – I promise an update soon! I’ve been designing a minibus booking form for the student website and studying for a Principles of Flight test over the last few days and this has left me desperately short of time

PPS -