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squelching through the puddles of standing water. Because of the way the aircraft’s nose was tilted up, neither of us could see a thing and Adam had to weave the plane from side to side, checking left and right to gauge the turn for the marked strip down the middle of the field that constituted the runway. The Moth seemed clumsy, ungainly, poorly balanced, lurching from side to side every time we hit a divot or a rabbit hole, and I remember thinking how unnatural the whole thing felt. Smoko and I had been friends in seconds. Flying, on first acquaintance, seemed a pretty grim substitute.
    Hard against the hedge at the end of the strip, I listened to Adam murmuring to himself as he ran through some kind of checklist. He seemed completely at home, completely happy, and after he’d told me to adjust the little rearview mirror attached to the top wing, he gave me a grin and a thumbs-up before revving the engine and turning the aircraft into the wind. The Moth began to gather speed and I became aware of the control stick moving between my legs as Adam pushed it forward to lift the tail. I gazed out, feeling the slipstream tightening the skin around my goggles, watching the grass blur beneath the wing. We were racing along now, the bumping beginning to ease, then suddenly we were airborne, the little biplane crabbing sideways for a moment or two until Adam kicked it straight.
    I felt myself grinning, and I looked back, straining against the harness straps, watching the Portakabin, and the tractor, and our battered old Sierra grow smaller and smaller until they disappeared altogether. I’d flown a lot in the Falklands, sometimes in planes little bigger than this one, but flying in the Moth, with its open cockpit and churning engine, was something so different, so new, that I began to understand why Adam had recommended it with such vigour.
    The needle on the altimeter was passing 1,200 feet. Away to the west I could see the shadowed wall of the Cairngorms. Beneath us, a perfect line of breaking surf stretched north towards Peterhead and Fraserburgh. Adam was singing now. He had the worst voice in the world, and absolutely no memory for lyrics, so he made them up the way he improvised so much of the rest of his life, and he was still murdering one of the early Beatles numbers when he dropped the little biplane’s nose, revealing a fishing boat and a cloud of seagulls several thousand feet beneath us. I watched the boats get bigger quickly. The note the wind was making in the wires that cross-braced the wings got shriller and shriller. Then the stick came back towards me, and my stomach fell away, and Adam pulled the nose of the Moth up and up until I could see nothing but sky. For a moment we were upside-down, the beat of the engine much slower, then the Moth came off the top of the loop and I watched the coast revolve around us, a whole 360 degrees, until we’d levelled out, the engine churning away again as if nothing had ever happened. The noise Adam could hear in his earphones was quite unprompted, a spontaneous round of applause, my own glad admission that - yet again - my lovely husband had been right.
    ‘ What’s going on?’ he yelled.
    ‘ Nothing.’ I tried to stop giggling. ‘You just changed my life.’
    Later, we flew inland, up the valley of the Dee towards Balmoral and Braemar. I sat hunched in my cockpit, glad of the leather helmet and the extra sweater, fascinated by how responsive and alive the aircraft felt beneath my fingers. Adam had given me control after half an hour or so. I was to fly straight and level, ignoring the instruments in front of me, selecting a landmark way ahead and keeping it lined up with a point on the aircraft’s nose. The landmark I chose turned out to be the shoulder of Lochnagar, a distinctive mountain easy to spot amongst the surrounding peaks, and I watched it drift slowly closer, nudging the biplane back on course from time to time with tiny little movements on the stick or