Weather to fly......

The Channel Islands, well Guernsey in particular, seem to have it in for me.

One of my best friends moved there a few years ago so seeing her involves flying from Bristol or Exeter. Now I'm not overly keen on flying these days and only manage to get on aircraft at all thanks to hypnosis and a family sized pack of Valium.

The fear isn't as bad as it used to be, those days of 'oh dear god the pilot has forgotten to put down the landing gear, I need to jump out of my seat and warn him right now' have passed, thankfully.

Now I plug myself into my iPod and turn the music up loud so I can't spend the flight convincing myself the engines have cut out....

Which brings me back to Guernsey. It hadn't really crossed my mind until I turned up for my first skip across the Channel that the plane would be small.......well there's small and then there's a yellow sewing machine on wheels and that's what we were going on. I fully expected to see the pilot cranking the propellors to get the thing started. If he'd climbed aboard in a wartime leather flying helmet I wouldn't have been surprised. I've blanked the rest of that flight from my memory although I seem to remember whimpering at one stage.

Going from Exeter is slightly better as the planes, while still props, are bigger and newer. It was a bit unnerving though when on my last flight the cabin crew asked some of the footie team who had all gone to sit at the back, to move forward to balance the plane!

So wouldn't you think that the Channel Islands would take it easy on me? Oh no, I've been subjected to gale force winds, fog suddenly descending and apocalyptic rain storms. My next flight is tomorrow morning and as I write this the sun is shining and it's a lovely bright summer evening. The forecast for tomorrow? Yep, torrential rain and thunderstorms. Oh joy.