Monday 11th August 2014

It is very rarely that I can say with some certainty what I was doing 15 years ago. But I can say that today, as on the 11th August 1999, I was flying to Las Vegas on det with the RAF. Its a hard life and someone has to go, stay in 5* hotels, visit casinos, live on $95 a day rates, so it may as well have been me, right?

And so we left Lyneham at oh oh me dearie dearie me hours when despite it being August it was still dark. This was to drive the hour to Brize, and be ready for wheels at dawn. Or something. Now quite why the military likes early starts, and says, oh i don't know, shall we meet just after brunch and go from there? NO it had be at the crack of sparras.

As we waited for the take off to Sin City, the pilot came over the tannoy and announced he wanted to see the eclipse, and so he had filed a flight plan so that we would.

Now, the eclipse: I had wanted to see this since at the age of young, my parents had bought a Readers Digest map of the world and in it, it listed the eclipses for the rest of the century, including this one, which would be visible from Cornwall. Only I would be flying to Vegas when the eclipse was due.

Only I was going to see it, whilst, sadly, the rest of the UK would not see it due to cloud. Fancy that.

And so we took off, flew to Cornwall, circled a bit and the sky darkened, stars came out and the eclipse begun. It was amazing, night at mid morning. I got to the window to just see the final moments of totality, then the effect known as Baily's Beads shown as sunlight could be see through the mountains of the edge of the moon, giving a diamond ring effect.

We flew onto Vegas, where we checked into the hotel, then like good airmen we hit the town with the offgoing team, then stayed out. Stayed out until half nine the next morning. I think we had been up 48 hours and were drunk as skunks for the detachment briefing. Our baby engineering officer was complaining, so we threw her in the pool to shut her up. she got out complaining, so we threw her back. I hope she found it as funny as we did.

Saturday.

We had plenty of tidying up to do. Two weeks building work creates lots of dust and rubble and rubbish, so we tidied up, went to the tip. I went to Tesco to get the weekly shop.

In truth, the day kinda slipped away from us. I mowed the lawn in the afternoon and then had a beer on the patio admiring the good work I had done.

what I can say is that the house looks really good with the rubble and rubbish cleared up and will look sensational when the new windows are put in and the render applied.

I did also do a lot of reading, Peter Juke's crowdfunded book on the hacking trial, Beyond Contempt. I helped crowdfund the live tweeting he did, and paid up front to get the e book version. Reading the back story and the behind the scenes dram is very interesting, and it is good to think that I help him achieve this. Why you ask: well, can we really rely on the newspapers to report accurately on their own failings? In a word: no. We can't, and Peter managed to avoid multiple contempt and tweet accurately and concisely. A stunning piece of work.

And in this way, the day passed.

In the evening we sat down to watch a taped documentary on John Webster, the playwright. All was going well until Jools announced she was going to have a bonfire. She had obtained an oil drum for such purposes, and so all was set and all went well until the decking caught fire.



It has happened before, and with a sigh we got the hosepipe out to douse the smouldering planks, and then sit outside until I was sure it would not flare up again.