A book I will write, Mike, about the 'good old days'. When flying with you and Dad was free and easy. Now remind of some of those escapades.

Shooting duck from the BA Swallow, landing the Auster on Snowdon for a week-end of rock-climbing with Jack Hampson, flying to Donegal in the Sipa 901 in a snow storm with Janet, 8 bore, 12 bore and a gun dog. Oh, yes, and two five gallon sherry containers full of petrol, at 10 shillings a gallon, to squeeze up the scuttle tank, between your feet. Only on the smell of 'go juice' and a set of tide tables for a landing sight outside your fishing lodge......20 years before Donegal airport was built. Then rounding up the geese by aircraft before the shoot.......flying back an IRA bombed out Cessna 150 from Northern Ireland with no wind screen or many instruments only to be hit by a double decker bus! .......oh and those Welsh police who had their car roof crushed by an aging Auster bound for a shooting trip and the Enniskilen Hunt Ball.  They refused to get out of the way, thinking the IRA had taken over St Angelo and I had to wait in Pembrokeshire for Customs..idiots...  and the hawker Hunter that gave chase from RAF Brawdy low, low level just so many stories when airports were, even then, the last place you ever took your aircraft.

Mike, airports are just the same now, if not worse......

You have to have permission to arrive, meaning you have to have an expensive bloody radio that works to shatter the peace. They fine you silly money  on arrival, often wasting fuel and time for other traffic and you then are made to park in the remotest place to walk, usually in the rain and climb often still up some ladder to pay a bored air traffic controller who has no change.

That's only the start,,,,,you have to get permission to leave and if you pay for 'motion lotion' expect some inflated price. The flying cubs, as you knew it, have all but gone replaced by slick operators in suits offering flying by the hour in three figures. Spam cans and plastic two-stroke powered aerofoils dominate the scene. Long gone are the beautiful tail draggers you can land on some remote river bank for a spot of fly fishing

I remember at breakfast table Dad would say: "Remember boys if you think you may have been 'inadvertently' low flying [below 500 feet] and someone saw you.....put your wheels down, it is a landing".

Mike, we will talk again when I write a chapter