It’s now December and the festive season will soon be upon us. The skies are blue but temperatures have plummeted at night and the wind cuts to the bone. The snow capped mountains of the Sierra Nevada are a tempting sight for us skiers.
The other year the kids bought me a remote control helicopter as a Xmas present. Resisting the temptation to open the box on Xmas Eve, I woke up like an excited child the following morning to prepare for the inaugural flight.
The first signs were not promising – inadequate altitude and insufficient/excessive acceleration coupled with incompetent aeronautics – so I decided to move out of the safe environs of the sitting-room and into the thrill but dangers of the street. The blades rotated at speed, the vertical take-off was magnificent and the helicopter soared……… backwards. I suddenly realised that unless I took immediate action my new toy was destined for a tragic watery end in the Mediterranean so I ditched it and the helicopter made a less than graceful landing on a neighbour’s roof.
I cautiously knocked on his door. Now, I may know a few Spanish words but ‘Apologies for disturbing you on this most holy of days but my spanking new remote control helicopter has gone into a tail-spin and appears to have lodged itself on your rickety corrugated asbestos roof’ tested me to the limit. Without batting an eyelid, Francisco proceeded to place a ladder on his upper terrace and climb onto the roof. He returned a few minutes later, helicopter in hand, and rather disappointedly asked ‘Is this it?’, clearly having expected to find a full-scale model.
As we descended, I noticed the rather large cannabis plant on his patio. Perhaps this explained his relaxed frame of mind.
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ReplyDeleteOr maybe he was disappointed and confused by the size of your aircraft because he was actually listening to the end of Another Brick In The Wall Part 1 before it goes into The Happiest Days of Our Lives, off of The Wall album. Seems a likely choice of music given the supplements growing in the garden, and I myself have been convinced of a helicopter's imminent landing listening to the same Pink Floyd album, under similar...uh...medicinal circumstances.
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