At home I spend many a happy hour musing on possible sites to land a helicopter –specifically an air ambulance — basically there is nowhere within two miles that is flat or not festooned with power lines or patrolled by ferocious cattle.  The only flat place on the farm is where Alan has built an enormous bonfire which was too dangerous to light all summer and is now too wet!

Anyway, as everyone knows, no one ever gets around to being sure that they are ill enough to call an ambulance in the morning.  We have our lunch at 3pm and it’s dark by 4 — the Welsh Air Ambulance doesn’t fly after dark which is as well with all the mountains and the above hazards.

We’ve been in Lostwithiel in Cornwall — on the Fowey River.  There was a colossal roar the other day — so tantalizingly loud that Pedro and I had to go and investigate!

50 yards from the house we found the source of the row — a Cornwall Air Ambulance –come to pick someone up from the adjacent medical centre.

Here they are being loaded:

See –it’s already dusk, but note how wonderfully flat it is.

Then it started to roar again and the rotor blades which were drooping started to rotate faster and faster and got flatter and flatter and louder and louder until one thought it couldn’t try any harder — but it did  and, as Pedro sank to the ground and covered his ears, it lifted lightly up and turned to face us.  

It flew directly at us (must have seen the camera) then rose up in an aerial pirouette —

— and set off towards Plymouth.  Good Luck!