TAKING THE FLIGHT TO INDIA
In the late afternoon I looked out through corridors of glass at planes that were so huge and complicated it was a wonder they could move a few yards let alone fly six and a half miles in the sky over Arabia. When it did take off, over houses and people watching television whilst others made cups of tea, it became clear that until a certain height you can see the minutest detail, and as we rose higher over Istanbul, people could still be made out doing simple things like pruning their privet. Cars were moving silently and to destinations I could already see. Watching life from a plane is almost like looking into the future. Should that motorist be in danger of an ambush, I and not he would know first. Instead I saw only ladies in hats, who, sitting around swimming pools only became animated when one blew away in the wind. The plane became an inverse symbol of the journey, capable of doing all the things my bike couldn't. With a following wind and a dry surface any sports bike and good rider can get to the end of a runway without being completely out classed, but what then? The bike was faster and easier than bicycling or walking and in the time it takes to walk a mile, a motorcycle can cross a county. Maybe it's just part of the relativity principle because in the same time a plane can cross a country, a spaceship is on the right trajectory to leave the earth.

Alchemy is the process whereby certain elements change, principally where lead is changed to gold. A plane changes the way we are. In a plane, carrying with it the trace of all the lands and seas it crosses before it reaches the clouds - above which it has been suggested that at night it also takes in the stars - it is also a vehicle that provides us with an imaginative counterweight. After all, if you have an adventurous spirit that needs feeding, anything was better than the rhythm of everyday life and the bondage of always knowing what you were going to do next. In my kitchen back home I would watch my middle son peal potatoes for Sunday lunch as my eldest son watched a movie on the TV. My small girl would finger through her brother's books and I would sweep the floor, but in another moment in time I was also in that plane where I saw the edges of a desert shim down from a land God described in the Bible, which turned blood red as the sun dropped to the horizon and the sand lapped at the shores of the Arabian Sea.

As we saw in the distance the dark brooding interiour of India I watched the wing flaps begin to extend as we descended, where it was easy to see fishermen's night lights off the shores of Marahastra. When the flaps dipped to braking position, Mumbai's streetlamps almost joined the runway until you saw men hunched around sentry fires as we set about to land.