Famous Flyers, Cayley's Glider, The Wright Brothers, and The Spirit of St Louis

Part one of a small history of famous flying machines and their creators.


-Cayley's Glider

When we think of attempts to create flying machines before the great breakthroughs of the 20th century we tend to imagine the kind of contraptions seen in many comedic silent news films. These daft devices nearly always appear to be mimicking the flapping of birds wings in a futile attempt to get airborne. To our more enlightened eyes such machines seem comically misguided and a conformation of the view that whatever great things the people of past centuries thought or created they certainly had not the slightest idea how to create a working plane. In fact while the plane is undoubtedly an invention of our modern times it is grossly unfair to overlook that that invention owes almost everything to the work of others in previous centuries, and that while the inventors of the 18th and 19th century didn't create a plane it wasn't for the wont of trying. The most well known of ancient flying machines are the ones penned by Leonardo da Vinci in his notebooks, (it is not known if he ever got as far a trying to build his drawing in real life), and it is because of his influence that the popular myth has taken hold that the only way that pre-20th century people thought to fly was by copying bird's flapping wings. Leonardo made thousands of drawings of the anatomy of humans and animals and naturally his curiosity led him the question of birds, bats and insects and how they were able to fly. Leonardo's 'ornithopter' drawings show his attempts to figure out how a human might be fitted into a winged-contraption that the operator could then flap the wings with the aid of a hand crank mechanism. Leonardo's sketches are beautiful and fascinating, but had very little to do with the modern day aeroplane. His drawings of a helicopter-like device are more relevant and prescient than his flights of fancy of human-powered bird wings. In his sketches of a spiral-shaped flying machine Leonardo seems to be interpreting the air as something substantial just like water and that he might create flight much as a person can stay afloat by treading water; the machine might stay up by pushing enough air down. As Isaac Newton would explain in a later century; every action has an opposite reaction, Leonardo was on the right track but apparently never quite made a breakthrough

It would be in the early 19th century when the principles of what would later be called aerodynamics would be explored much more fully by a man who remains a surprisingly obscure figure considering the amazing flying machines he created; Sir George Cayley. Cayley was a Yorkshire baronet, an aristocrat with the time and money to invest in engineering projects. As well as experiments with engines, boats, prosthetic limbs and armaments, Cayley was fascinated with the possibility of creating flying machines. He built a model glider as early as 1804, and a few years later was authoring papers that discussed the fundamental principles of flight including the basic forces at work - lift, drag, gravity and thrust. It was Cayley who first truly understood the airfoil and how wings generate uplift without any bird-like flapping action. Cayley's work had led to him being recognised today as the pioneer aeronautical engineer. In 1853 Cayley put all that he had learnt through half a century of curious experimentation into a full size glider that was flown across a Yorkshire moor called Brompton Dale - possibly by Cayley's footman although the exact pilot is unclear - the first recorded controlled flight of any significant distance with a human pilot aboard.

Cayley's glider resembles a canoe suspended below a leaf-shaped wing and while being undoubtedly primitive it demonstrates it's creators fundamental understanding of the principles of flight and the several exceptional insights that allowed Cayley's glider to work successfully. The structure is light and the wing is large enough to generate sufficient lift; to keep the shape rigid without adding too much weight the craft is intricately braced with wires, some in tension and others in compression, much as in a modern hang glider. The pilot sits well forward in the gondola to counterbalance the weight of the tailplane - the tail plane is separate from the main wing and provides essential stability. As well as the tail there is a rudder to provide steering, and the pilot holds the handle of the rudder is much the same way as a gondolier holds his steering punt. The rudder mechanism is also balanced about it's centre to keep the craft's weight even. Later planes of course would surpass Cayley by giving the pilot direct control of the tail itself. Lastly the glider has landing wheels, again presciently arranged in a triangular shape with two at the front and one trailing wheel. modern replica flights have shown just how successful Cayley's craft was, and how the possibly apocryphal story of his footman telling the baronet wide eyed after his flight "I was hired to drive not to fly!" may have come about.

The Victorians were aware of how to make something fly but had an intractable problem; the steam engine didn't generate enough power to lift it's own (considerable) weight off the ground. The huge weight of steam engines had been the reason that railways developed as the first form of mass transit. Smooth iron (later steel) rails supported and guided heavy engines with their huge boilers. steam powered road vehicles were tried even before the invention of railways but were almost always far too cumbersome and temperamental to control to be of much practical use. The Victorians, despite the best efforts of inventive geniuses like Cayley would remain mostly land bound. it would take the discovery of oil, the distillation of petroleum fuel, and the coming of the internal combustion engine to get humans airborne.


-Wright Flyer

The 19th century, and the Victorian-era, only just missed out being able to claim the credit for inventing the aeroplane. A mere three years after the turn of the century a small craft made of wood and canvas made a controlled, powered flight across some sand dunes in North Carolina USA. At the helm was a bicycle maker from Ohio called Orville Wright. Watching his flight was his brother, and the co-creator of the machine, Wilbur. The flight lasted 59 seconds and covered 35 metres - less, as trivia fans love to recall - than the wingspan of the Boeing 747 jumbo jet that would fly a mere 66 years later. Like many pioneers who are heralded as the 'inventors' of something - Alexander Bell for the telephone, Philo Farnsworth for the television, Henry Ford for the mass produced car - the Wright brothers are frequently dismissed as being the recipients of an unfair amount of attention at the expense of other, earlier inventors. Almost as equally other names are put forward as the 'real' inventor of the aeroplane, with passionate cases argued that powered flights were made many years before the Wrights by other overlooked pilots.

Indeed some inventors did come tantalizingly close to powered flight many years before the Wrights. In 1874 Felix du Temple, a French navy officer, managed a brief "hop" in a steam-powered plane, but never achieved more. The ingenious and compact steam engine that he used for power did become a successful naval engine however. Ten years later another navy officer - this time a Russian called Alexander Mozhaysky - performed a similar feat in a similar steam-powered flyer. In 1890 a French engineer called Clement Ader flew a steam-powered flyer he called the Eole approximately fifty metres. However it was not a controlled flight; the Eole evidently could not be steered, and in all event flew less than a metre off the ground. Subsequent modern day experiments have shown that each of these pioneers could have developed their planes further into something more successful, and that the main sticking point for each was the power -or rather the lack of power - their steam engines could develop. Unlike the Wrights, du Temple and Mozhaysky launched their crafts down ramps, much like a modern day stunt motorbike rider might while jumping over an obstacle, which probably contributed somewhat to the how their craft became airborne.

Modern experiments have also shown that another individual designed a machine that could have flown under it's own power and beaten the Wrights to the claim as inventor of the aeroplane. An English university lecturer called Percy Pilcher built many manned gliders late in the 1890s and drew up plans for what would later be known as a tri-plane. After corresponding with another glider enthusiast, an American railway engineer called Octave Chanute, Both men came up with a simple way of creating more lift from wings; stack multiple wings on top of each other, like the shelves of a bookcase. Alas, Pilcher died in a crash of one of his gliders in 1899 and his plans disappeared into obscurity. A replica of Pilcher's planned plane was built in 2003 by students of Cranfield university and was flown, under control, for over half a minute longer than the Wrights first flight. Another glider pilot, who had also experimented with biplane designs, a German called Otto Lillenthal had also perished three years earlier in a crash, removing another potential usurper of the Wright's achievement. Chanute's 'biplane' gliders influenced the Wrights greatly, and their flyer's wings were essentially copied from Chanute's designs although Chanute, nearing his 70th birthday and already retired and rich, was evidently happy to allow his designs to influence others.

Many commentators have observed that the Wright brothers genius lay not just in creating their flyer but in remembering to pack a camera and to take some photographs of the machine in flight - something the other contenders all evidently failed to do. Most notably a German-born American emigre called Gustave Whitehead. Debate has raged hotly ever since Whitehead's claimed flights in his "No. 21" plane in 1901. Contemporary local news reports claimed that Whitehead flew over 800 metres in Bridgeport Connecticut in the "No 21" but no photographs of the feat were published or have ever been conclusively found. Whitehead, also unlike the Wrights, did not keep a journal or log book to document his claims. Whether or not the Whitehead plane did or did not fly, what is not in doubt is that Whitehead, like du Temple and Mozhaysky before him, did not capitalise on his ideas in the subsequent years and lived the rest of his in relative obscurity.

While the Wright's fame owes something to fortune and timing, they were still brilliant engineers who worked tirelessly and meticulously on their ideas and whose successful designs and flights were the end result of much exhaustive testing and refining of their designs. Like so many great inventors they came from humble backgrounds, worked out of small workshops, and were obsessively dedicated to their pursuits. Neither married or fathered children and they lived together in the same house, devoting all their time to their bicycle manufacturing business and their flying machines. The bicycle business provided them with a keen understanding of precise engineering and of the importance of the fine tuning designs for optimum balance and control - a philosophy that would be reapplied to planes; the Wrights would work for many years on creating their control systems and working on the weight distribution of their gliders before adding an engine. The Wrights did something that was far ahead of it's time; they built a wind tunnel to test models in. The wind tunnel allowed many ideas to be tried out quickly and saved money and time on costly and potentially very dangerous test flights. Both brothers were also both conspicuously free of egos - neither ever tried to claim precedence over the other, they took turns flying their gliders, they would even quarrel furiously with each other before agreeing a truce and that both of them had a valid opinion! Their lack of showiness had a practical benefit too; another competitor in the race to create a plane, the wealthy Samuel Pierpoint Langley, would test his contraptions in the middle of Washington DC in the full view of press, politicians and his sponsors. The Wrights avoided reporters, politics and money-men, something that initially caused a slow recognition of their historic flight, but their meticulous nature in logging and photographing their flights meant that nobody could deny their achievements once they had been achieved.

To modern eyes the Wright flyer is rather odd in arrangement. It has all the familiar pieces; wings, propellers, stabilisers, tail fins, cockpit, flying controls, but laid out back-to-front. The horizontal stabilizers are not on the tail with the vertical fins but in front of the pilot. The propellers are behind the wing not in front and push the plane along rather than pull it. The pilot lies prostrate on their belly on top of the wing and controls the flyer by swinging side-to-side in a cradle. The wings do not have ailerons like a modern plane - these would first appear a decade later - instead the flyer uses 'wing warping'; the wing tips are pulled by the control wires. This difference aside the pilot has the almost the same amount of control as on all subsequent conventional planes. The warping wings controlled the plane's roll (side to side), the front canard wings the pitch (up and down), and the rudder the plane's yaw (left and right) mastering the mechanics involved in providing reliable control over the plane's three axis of movement was the Wright's greatest breakthrough and legacy. In fact, much of the glory for the Wright's breakthroughs should really be reserved for the brother's second and third Flyers. The first Flyer, the one that appears in every history book, and is copied in countless full size replicas, never flew after it's first brief voyages. The brothers second Flyer, built in 1904, flew over one hundred times, flying for up to five minutes and performing the first controlled flying circles. It was dismantled at the end of the year and it's parts salvaged to make a third Flyer - that would fly up to twenty five miles and carry the first ever air passenger. It was also designed to make the rudder entirely separate from the wing warping system, thus giving the pilot exactly the same controls as in any standard aeroplane. Today the Wright Flyer III of 1905 sits quietly in a gallery in Dayton Ohio, part the city wide historic park preserving key Wright brothers locations around the city; their homes, their bicycle shop and office. It is a far cry from the national Air and Space Museum in Washington DC where the original Flyer is stared at by thousands of people every day.

These days the Wright brothers are two of the most famous inventors in the history of the world. But in the immediate years after their first flight their names were not widely known, and when they were mentioned it was often along with doubts about whether they really had built a flying machine or whether they were hoaxers. In the days before radio and television the publicity shy Wrights did not do much travelling to promote themselves and the only way for journalists, photographers and members of the public to see their flights was to chance upon them. As a consequence, especially in the snobbish European establishment, the achievements of the Wrights went somewhat unnoticed for several years. Only when they made public demonstrations in France in the summer of 1908 did the European press and public begin to acknowledge them. By then however they had some serious competition that threatened to overtake their advantage and move the centre of aviation development from eastern USA to Europe.

Alberto Santos Dumont was born in Brazil the heir of family rich from the coffee business, but lived in Paris most of his life. His wealth allowed him to hire private tutors to teach him the sciences and engineering, but like many adventurous young men from wealthy backgrounds Dumont was not content to live an easy life and took to being a balloon pilot, taking joyrides above Paris. He took to designing 'dirigibles' (the french term for airships) and would tour the city, often landing outside his favourite cafe. Dumont was everything the Wright's were not; he became a celebrity, made friends with royalty and the rich, and became a fashion trendsetter. For all his pretensions he was an extremely intelligent engineer and by 1905 was working on his own powered aeroplane. A year later he flew his '14-bis' plane 60 metres - the first powered flight in Europe. The 14-bis was influenced by the Wright's planes; it was a biplane with it's control surfaces in front of the pilot. but Santos introduced an important innovation that the Wright's had not adopted. The wings on Santos's plane swept up in a 'v' shape (called a dihedral angle). the upsweep gave the plane much more stability and reduced 'sideslip' when banking over, meaning the plane would have a greater tendency to fly with it's wings level. This in turn allowed Santos to experiment with more radical moving surfaces to improve maneuverability. His next plane, the Demoiselle was, in the basics, essentially the same layout as any small propeller plane that followed. It was a monoplane, with one large wing, the engine sat at the front, with the pilot behind, and a tailplane mounted out behind. Alas, after creating two revolutionary planes Santos Dumont fell ill with multiple sclerosis and never fulfilled his promise as a engineer. He returned to Brazil and lived in a house of his own design. He died in the 1930s in mysterious circumstances. Wilbur wright died from typhoid fever in 1912, Orville lived till 1948, long enough to see his invention surpass the speed of sound.


-Spirit of St Louis

In the summer of 1927 a quiet 25 year old former ail mail pilot shot from obscurity to being the by far the most famous person in the world. What Charles A. Lindbergh did to become so instantly famous was quite simple - he flew from New York to Paris. To modern eyes not a great challenge, thousands of people do the same thing every day on hundreds of different flights. Even in 1927 it was not an unprecedented feat to fly across the forbidding expanse of the Atlantic ocean. What made Lindbergh exceptional was what he did but how he did it; he flew entirely solo, in a small plane, directly from an airfield near New York to an airfield near Paris. He made no mistakes, did not get lost or run low on fuel, and in the process showed the world that the aeroplane had the potential to travel from any one place on the earth to any other without problems. Plus, from the adoring public's point of view, it helped that "Lindy" was a boyish, modest, polite, wholesome and clean-cut figure who made for a perfect role model. his talent and heroism had also made something extremely dangerous look easy.

What is often forgotten nowadays is that Lindbergh was not the only person trying to cross the ocean at the time. He was in a competition called the Orteig prize - a large cash prize offered up to anyone who could make the trip from New York to Europe. The other teams were all much larger than Lindbergh's - in fact, Lindbergh didn't really have a team, just a very small group of mechanics. Neither did he surround himself with press and publicity people and other frivolous hangers-on who were not essential to his task. And by flying entirely solo he also avoided the internal politicking and arguments that characterised his rivals efforts. For example the great favourite was the team led by Commander Richard Byrd. At the time Byrd was feted as being the first explorer to fly over the North Pole, but there were many mumbled suspicions that he had falsified his logbook and had come nowhere near to overflying the pole. This episode aside, Byrd was a great explorer, but also possessed a great ego. In his journals he barely gave credit to the efforts of his crew,and especially his Norwegian pilot Bernd Balchen. He fell out with the designer of his plane America, the Dutch engineer Antony Fokker, after a crash while testing that plane- a crash that took Byrd's team out of contention just long enough to allow Lindbergh in. Another team vying against Lindbergh was the crew of the Columbia. The plane, designed by a genius engineer called Mario Bellanca was ready well before the rival planes and had already recorded an endurance record circling above New York for 51 hours, earlier in 1927. Their pilot Clarence Chamberlin was almost the equal to Lindbergh in skills and in calm temperament. By contrast their team leader Charles Levine was an extremely unreliable operator who seemed to specialise in causing grief and upset. Levine rarely paid his team the money he said he would and loved to change to crew roster on a whim. One of his changes proved to be costly when his original co-pilot Lloyd Bertaud put in an injunction against Levine to prevent him flying. While the injunction was waiting to be lifted Lindbergh made his historic flight. The designer Bellanca also left the team shortly after. A year earlier Levine had been approached by Lindbergh the year before to sponsor Lindbergh's flight. Levine had agreed but waited until Lindbergh arrived at his offices with a cheque in hand from his backers to tell him that while he would take the money to build a plane he couldn't guarantee that Lindbergh would be the pilot. Naturally the deal immediately fell through and the young air mail pilot went off to find somebody else to build him a plane.

Lindbergh's plane was a relatively straightforward device, compared to the opposition. For a start it only had the one engine. Commander Byrd's America had three 200 horsepower radial engines, giving it three times the power but also three times the weight. The Spirit of St Louis weighed in at just under 1000kg whereas the America was over 3000kg - and that was without the weight of the occupants or fuel. The crucial importance of the planes weight to a successful long distance flight, and the dangers of designing an overweight plane had been demonstrated with the crash in 1926 at Roosevelt Field of another Orteig Prize contender, the Sikorsky S35. Even though the Sikorsky company would later become the name synonymous with the first helicopters, and though the plane was flown by the French flying ace Rene Fonck, the plane never even managed to begin it's planned flight across the Atlantic. Despite the fact that the fully loaded Sikorsky was 1800kg overweight when fuelled, Fonck had ambitiously made an attempt to takeoff. The plane never came close to flying and crashed heavily when it's landing gear collapsed. Only two of it's four occupants - Fonck and his co-pilot managed to escape before the wrecked plane exploded.

Fonck's plane had far more powerful engines than either Lindbergh or Byrd, but his rushed preparation had doomed his attempt and destroyed the first serious contended for the prize. The Americans were all using Wright Company 'Whirlwhind' engines, but these were far from guaranteed to be powerful enough for the job. A month before Lindbergh's flight two US Navy pilots, Noel Davis and Stanton Wooster, had unveiled their Orteig prize contender, a three engine plane called the Pathfinder. The Pathfinder's original engines were far more powerful than the Wright engines, but also consumed far too much fuel for a practical non-stop Atlantic crossing, so they were replaced with Wright engines. Unfortunately little about the design of the plane was changed to account for the reduced power. On a test flight shortly before their planned trans=Atlantic flight, Davis and Wooster both perished when the underpowered and overloaded plane crashed after failing to climb over a row of trees. A few weeks later came yet another challenger; this time aiming to fly in the opposite direction, from Paris to New York. This was thought to be a much harder challenge - the 'jet stream' was unknown in the 1920s but the prevailing winds were known to blow mostly from west to east. The two pilots, experienced French flyers called Charles Nungessor and Francois Coli, knew this too but reckoned they did not had time to ship their plane - the Oeseau Blanc (White Bird), to America. Their plane too was heavy, and only had enough fuel for an almost direct flight to New York, there was no margin for error. Nungessor and Coli took off from Paris early in May 1927, were briefly sighted heading out to sea of the southern tip of Ireland, and disappeared forever somewhere over the ocean. What happened to them remains a mystery.

The crashes underlined the importance of good preparation and, perhaps even more importantly, patience. Unfortunately not a virtue that was encouraged by the race for the glory and the prize on offer for the first to make the flight. Experienced designers were being rushed into creating half-baked and underpowered planes, and some of the world's best pilots were rushing to get them ready and paying the price. Curiously enough Lindbergh's preparations were a strange mixture of prudence and recklessness. When he took delivery of the plane from it's builders, the Ryan Aircraft company, he flew it single-handedly from California to Lindbergh Field, across an entire continent's worth a adverse weather, including thunderstorms and the rains that were causing the great Mississippi floods of that summer. Though somewhat foolhardy (and nerve racking for his backers) his combined delivery and test flight made him familiar with the characteristics of his plane, including it's somewhat unbalanced nature - something Lindbergh didn't mind, as he thought that his plane's slightly unpredictable tendencies would help keep him alert on the long Atlantic crossing. Aside from his individualistic testing methods, in other ways Lindbergh was very prudent and his care and attention to detail was reflected in the design of the Spirit. Ballanca's Columbia, the plane Lindbergh might have ended up piloting but for the machinations of it's owner Levine, was a very similar design to the Spirit. It too had one engine, was made of a steel frame wrapped in fabric, and had proven it's ability to fly long distances - far more so, in fact, than the Spirit. But Lindbergh's plane was purely a single seater, and was far more purposeful. Many thought Lindbergh hopelessly out of his depth deciding to fly solo for such a long distance. But Lindbergh was an experienced air mail pilot, and used to navigating on his own. He also reasoned there was no need for a radio operator; either he would make it or he wouldn't, and a radio introduced a risk of fire in the cockpit. One feature of the plane that Lindbergh specified can still raise eyebrows even today - it seem to have no forward visibility at all. To Lindbergh's highly rational mind he didn't need to see forward over the open ocean, and the nose would be a good place to put the main fuel tank. To see he would side-slip the plane and look out the door window, like a steam engine driver. Having the heavy fuel tank in the nose would make the plane safer if he did crash; he wouldn't be crushed by the tank.

On May 20th 1927 Charles Lindbergh arrived at Roosevelt Field early in the morning and readied his plane for it's planned flight. 1200 kg of fuel was pumped aboard and Lindbergh climbed into his small wicker cockpit seat - a seat made intentionally uncomfortable, again to help keep the pilot from dozing off. At ten minutes to eight in the morning the fully loaded Spirit took off, lumbering past a row of power lines at the end of the runway by barely six metres. Although the plane had flown across America in the weeks previously it had never flown across a long stretch of water and the small channel between Long Island and the main land was the first time it had done so. Lindbergh followed the coast all the way up to Newfoundland, all the while sightseers underneath kept a lookout. The new contender had so suddenly appeared in the race that not many people knew much about him, and many doubted he could really make the journey single handedly. Finally he made the turn away from land and disappeared from all sight and radio contact until he reached France. The modern day airliner captain flying from New York to Paris get a comfortable ride that takes around six hours. The jet engines power them up to over 500 mph, the pressurised cabin means they can fly at over 9 km up high above most of the world's weather, the computerised flight controls can fly the plane automatically - the pilot is really only a supervisor to the computer - and the computer can navigate itself from the departure gate at one end to the arrival gate at the other. Lindbergh had none of these things. His plane had one piston engine, could fly at up to 130 mph, and as high as 5 km. His journey would take over thirty hours, trying to claw over storm clouds, and descending frequently to try to de-ice his control surfaces. He had to navigate with pencil and notepaper, relying on the stars, and keeping track of his speed and heading, all while juggling the fuel valves leading from the several tanks to the engine, and manually steering the stick and rudder pedals. All while sitting in a small wicker chair inside a metal frame covered in doped fabric like a giant tent, strapped behind a deafening engine thundering away in front - an engine on which his life entirely depended. If it were to fail, only he would know of his fate, as there was no radio to summon any help.

When Lindbergh appeared over Paris after over a day of silence, the Parisian public reacted not so much with a jubilation but with something approaching rapture. They were pleased to see him alive and well, of course, but there was far more it than that. His arrival signalled the beginning of a new era. One French politician referred to the intrepid pilot as the first "citizen of the world", as indeed he was. He would return to New York by steamship, but his flight had clearly foreshadowed the what the future could hold. For the next few months he would fly the Spirit around America on a goodwill tour. Ironically while he would be remembered for his brave flight over the Atlantic it would his tour of America that would be more influential, as American industry woke up to the possibilities of aviation. For half a year Lindbergh and the Spirit would hop around a giant continent, a continent whose inhabitants were used to travelling around by long distance sleeper train - if they travelled at all. Lindbergh and his sleek silver bird became a mascot for the aeroplane, and he was greeted by huge crowds everywhere he landed. After a year the Spirit would be retired to the Smithsonian Museum in Washington DC. The Ryan company of San Diego that built it carried on under the name of Mahoney-Ryan for two more years, building a plane based around the Spirit's design for general aviation use, before being sold and disbanded in 1929.

Four Days in Paris

We travelled down to London first class from Sheffield to St Pancras on the first cheap train of the day. We were sat behind a lively conversation between the four people on the seats next to us. It was mostly between a retirement age Australian man and a woman who worked for a wine company, and also seemed to dabble in the hotel trade teaching etiquette. They were all also heading for Paris, the woman for business of some kind, and the man and his wife as part of a European holiday. They had evidently been in the North of England for the past few weeks and the wine company woman quizzed them extensively on every detail of their trip, and frequently dropped in knowing references to many British stereotypes; how the north is much friendlier than the south, how there is much public drunkeness in England, how lovely York Minster is and so forth. She was one of those loquacious, excellently spoken people who can carry on conversation for hours and hours without actually saying anything remotely interesting. The man in turn dropped in many happily smug mentions of how comfortable and sunny life in Australia is. He had once been a teacher it seemed, and told a charming anecdote about his last day before retirement and how all the children at the school had been turned out to bid him farewell. From his various travels it seemed as though he and his wife were making the best of their retirement. It turned out the woman worked part time in Paris so was offering many tips on what to see there, although since the Australians were only there a few days this could consist only of saying that they should see the Eiffel Tower and maybe buy one of those Paris Pass things for the museums.

We had an hour and a half to pass at St Pancras before we could check into the Eurostar. At St Pancras the Eurostar platforms sit in the main train shed where the mainline trains once arrived and the check-in facilities are underneath in the old goods warehouse. I had wondered beforehand if the Eurostar had any security checks at all. As it turned out it had, but because the x ray checks and metal detectors only had to cope with three trains worth of passengers at a time compared to the tens of planes at an airport the security lines were far far shorter than at most airports. We had something to eat in the bistro at the end of the station, where, if my fading memories of the mid-1990s serve me correctly a WH Smith kiosk once stood. At this end of the station a huge sculpture of a departing couple sharing an embrace stands. It was attracting a fair few photos from passers by, yet the magnificent roof of the Victorian train shed and the handsome row of Eurostar trains was mostly ignored. It's funny how most people gravitate to the symbol of romance that the giant sculpture was providing, yet seemed to ignore the actual promise of adventure and romance sitting right behind them in the station.

The Eurostar is a big train; eighteen coaches long, and we had to walk down most of it to get to our coach. Still, I can't complain, it's very exciting to walk down the side of a train you know is about to head off at over 150mph with you aboard heading for France, and it's certainly has more of a feeling of glamour about it that crowding down the air corridor to get to a plane - no matter how big the plane is. I was a little disappointed to be sat behind one of the window pillar with only a small-ish view ahead, but not entirely surprised since we had booked some of the last available tickets on this train. Eurostar seems to be very popular these days and it doesn't surprise me - St Pancras is much easier to get to than Heathrow or Stanstead, and the Gare du Nord in Paris is a wee bit more central than Charles de Gaulle or Orly airports. The trains are showing it's age a little bit these days. Their interiors are a little square and plasticky compared to the newest of the Sheffield to London trains. They are undeniably smooth and comfortable, though, even if there isn't all that much to see on the journey to Paris. High Speed One in Kent speeds mostly though tunnels out of London (my ears were popping as we plunged in and out of them) and is hidden away in cuttings for the rest. After whizzing through the channel tunnel (the train manager came on to tell us that we were heading through, in such impeccable English and French it was impossible to tell which was their original tongue), it heads to Lille and then across the flat emptiness of Northern France and straight into the Northern suburbs of Paris.

It was raining hard when we stepped out of the Gare du Nord looking for a taxi to take us to our hotel. The lady driver could manage enough English to find the Hotel Eiffel Segur on her sat nav and took us on a brief tour of the north side of Paris. She pointed out a department store "verrree... expenseeve in zhere" she managed, and the Elysee Palace "vere ze President live", and across the river to, of course, "Eiffel Towerrr over 'ere". We had booked a place to have dinner on the tower that evening, booked well in advance of course as these days nothing as popular as a restaurant on the Eiffel Tower has tickets "on the door" any more. We found our hotel and were both pleased to see that it was smart and well kept. The lobby was being refurbished in a white painted modern fashion but behind the door marked "Chambres/Rooms" (nothing much in Paris is not subtitled in English any more, something I found a little disappointing - it didn't feel quite so exotic to see everything written in English too) there was an old wooden spiral staircase and walls done out in an interesting combination of mustard yellow and white, with red carpets. The man on the desk was from somewhere in Scandinavia and was able to answer our questions. The only one really was to do with the Metro line outside. I knew from my nerdy childhood days of reading anything and everything about cars, trains and planes that some bits of the Paris Metro ran on old elevated viaducts in the middle of the road and the hotel was evidently on a section like this. Very convenient, except that the whole shebang was covered in scaffolding;
"Is is shut?" we asked.
"Yes" came the answer, but fortunately there was another line and another station nearby. In only a few days were would become very familiar with the Segur station and in that time we would nearly be able to navigate back to the hotel from it. The problem was that with the big scaffolding covered train line in the way it was very difficult to remember which side of the road the hotel was on. And naturally both directions looked the same. The solution to the problem was the hulking Montparnasse Tower, the big 60s skyscraper in the distance - we knew the hotel was on the right side of the road when heading towards the Montparnasse Tower. It still took us a few tries to get this right.

The rain had slowed a little bit as we walked to the Eiffel Tower for our dinner date. We caught sight of it at the end of the long Champs du Mars boulevard. From this distance it looked quite small but that is because Paris had some very long and wide boulevards. I would say they reminded me of Washington DC but that would be the wrong way round as, of course, Paris's boulevards came first. The rain had made the grass in the middle a bit muddy so we crunched up the wet gravel towards to tower. This was the first time Becky had seen the tower and the first time I had seen it close up since a the school summer trip in 1994. That trip had been an tremendously fun experience, yet oddly only about twenty of us from school had been interested enough to go. We had seen loads - the Eiffel Tower, Versailles, the artists in Montmartre, Notre Dame, and yet most of my year at school had evidently not been interested. I've always felt a little embarrassed on behalf of my generation by that - when my brother's year had gone on the same trip, only a few years earlier, there had been over forty of them.

The Eiffel Tower is fabulous and you can't stop looking at it. Yes, partly this is because it's so famous, but mostly because it's so intricate and detailed, and the detail only increases getting closer. I remember being fascinated as a kid by the view up from directly underneath the tower. Of the four huge legs converging at the first level, and then continuing up to the second platform far above. With it's drab brown colour it looks like some kind of giant skeleton - an iron dinosaur - towering above your own puny self. It's the symmetry that is the most impressive feature, the way the incredible complexity repeats itself perfectly on all four sides. And it only gets better as the night rolls in and the whole thing is lit up in orange light. It's ironic really, for all the queues to see the view at the top, one of the best views in Paris is looking up at the thing from the bottom.

Dinner was at nine, we had to wait for a while in the lobby of the restaurant "58 Tour Eiffel" while they cleared away the previous sitting. But once we were in the service was impeccable and the food was - as to be expected - excellent. I had the Fois Gras simply because I had never had the stuff before, then the lamb. I don't even like lamb that much but it was delicious, and had some of the best "side salad" (for wont of a better phrase) I have ever tasted. The plate was also garnished with coriander and cumin paste, and chick peas, so I suppose I ate a very upmarket lamb curry. It was the dessert that was the best though; it was meringue, cream, and raspberries, but unlike any meringue I have had before it somehow wasn't dry. Well, the very outside was dry but the inside gradually got softer until reaching the wafer thin layer of fruit sauce in the middle. It was perfect, and I have seldom eaten more slowly and carefully, well aware that each forkful took me closer to eating the whole thing and having no more left.

The lift back down the the ground level was packed full so I took my chance and took to the stairs instead. It's always been a little goal of mine to one day walk the stairs all the way to top of the Eiffel Tower. It is impossible of course - the stairs to the very top are closed except as an emergency exit. So I took my chance to try a little bit of my dream. The rain was bucketing down now, and hundreds of drops dripped down from the tower as I gingerly picked down the stairs past the banks of spotlights beaming up and lighting the structure all around. All around the ground could be seen through the beams, and the sense of being very high up, even in the lowest section of the tower was strong. Maybe I wouldn't have the head for heights to try for the top after all. We met again at the bottom, hailed another taxi, and had a slightly embarrassing five minutes as neither of us could remember either the road the hotel was on or the (closed) metro station it was next to. I had left the convenient little tourist map out of my pocket for this evening, and neither of us had roaming internet so couldn't quickly look it up. For some reason this cab driver didn't have the sat nav his compatriot had had earlier in the day. Mercifully, and just as I was worrying that he might chuck us out for being slightly tipsy (the waiter had charged us for a glass of wine but had provided free refills because I had managed to address him in passable French rather than simply barking at him in English as is the standard practice of most visitors) and English, we passed a sign for "Cambronne" station and the penny dropped at last. I wish I had a better memory for names sometime, it was save some would save some embarrassing brain lapses.

In the morning we returned to the tower for a trip to the very top. The rain had abated but the daylight brought a new peril; hoards of street vendors - they carry the same wares, large rings of Eiffel Towers and other trinkets in their hands or slung over their shoulders. They aren't very persistent or intrusive but there are huge numbers of them. Standing back and estimating I would have said there was maybe one Senegalese street vendor for every three tourists. They were everywhere. Fortunately Becky had a neat trick her dad had told her. When asked if one could speak "ENGLISH???" by an vendor, simply reply "Nein, danke". Evidently pretending to be German works wonders - either they think you can't manage enough English to haggle with, or the German's have a poor reputation for generosity. Perhaps it's a bit of both, whatever it works a treat and is a well recommended tactic for a more enjoyable visit to Paris.

We had booked a "Skip the Line" tour on Expedia a few months earlier. This promised a guided tour of the second level of the tower but most usefully a way to skip the queues at the very base of the tower. I must admit, however, that the lines the previous night hadn't looked too bad - perhaps it was the rain - and this morning wondered idly if the tour was really going to be worth a small extra amount of euros simply to skip a brief bit of queuing. Though having seen the way the tat merchant sellers were trying to approach  people queuing I could see one advantage in not having to wait. They didn't stay long - every so often a posse of Gendarmes would stroll purposefully past, their semi-automatic rifles sending a signal that while they were on the lookout for anyone trying to park a truck full of explosives next to the tower, rounding up a few merchandise vendors and checking whether they had visas and work permits would not be out of the question. As it was the tour was very good. Ironically after all these years of visiting a brother in America I come to France and get an American tour guide, but she was very good at her job. We started in the Trocadero, the grand late thirties balcony overlooking the tower, walked down over the bridge and the River Seine, under the tower, and up to the second level. I only spotted one slight error in her commentary - the tower is not made of steel it's wrought iron - a minor point, but as a Sheffielder I should know what's made of steel and what isn't.

The Skip the Line tour didn't entitle us to skip the line to the third level of the tower, but we didn't have to wait long. Our guide had told us that Monsieur Eiffel hadn't actually designed the famous shape of the tower, two of his employees had done that, but had worked out how to put it all together and had the political connections to get it built. In doing so he'd had to fight against much of the cultural elite of Paris who had decried his idea as an ugly abomination. Never mind that it was supposed to be centrepiece of a World Exposition to showcase France's position in the world, they thought it was vulgar and would ruin the skyline of Paris. And in France "ugly" and "vulgar" are not things that are usually very welcome. Fortunately the pressure from all the artists, poets and politicians meant that the Eiffel Tower was located away from the historic centre of Paris, so it now commands and excellent view of that centre and of the nearly all rest of the city. Or rather, it does on a clear day. The rain and mist was drawing in as we rode the little lift to the top, up through the spindly framework of the top half of the tower.

M. Eiffel kept an apartment at the top of his tower, and looking from the second level way up to the small platform at the top I was moved to wonder why. It looks so precarious up there, as well as a little hard to get to. But once up the top you can see the appeal. They have kept a corner of his apartment preserved as it once would have been and it was quite a nice looking place. A bit bigger than you might expect, and with one heck of a view. We didn't quite get to see the view in all it's glory. The rain was coming down harder again, and the mist was pulling in. Still, it was fun to be at one of the most famous and distinctive spots in the world - the top of the most visited tourist attraction in the world.


We went walking through the streets near the tower but thanks to the incessant rain We ended up taking shelter in the French Military museum in the huge Les Invalides buildings. When we found that one of us could get in for free on account of being 25 or under we had a look around. The main draw of the museum is the tomb of Napoleon, underneath the famous golden dome, but the much of the rest is very diverting too, with displays of the French royal armories in the large galleries. After looking around the armories the sun chose a timely moment to arrive as we walked round the base of the golden dome an into the chamber containing Napoleon's tomb. His extremely large tomb. it is impressive certainly, but so enormous that it doesn't really feel like the tomb of a person at all, but a giant impersonal monolith. A set of stairs led down to the crypt level underneath the main floor where a big statue of Napoleon sits looking at the tomb. We walked around the upper and lower levels, looking at the large golden altar that sits behind the tomb, the impressive painted ceiling in the dome, the other smaller tombs around the rotunda; two of Napoleon's brothers, his son, Marshall Foch the French commander in WW1, the military architect Vauban. No Josephine though - Mrs. Napoleon is buried in a church in a suburb of Paris.

The sun had come out in full force by the time we'd had lunch and walked up another wide boulevard to the Seine. We crossed a bridge with four large pillars on it's four corners, and golden statues glinting in the sun on top. A large metal plaque on the the balustrade told us it was the Pont Alexandre and it was finished in 1900 - I would have guessed it was older given the baroque style of the statues and the decoration, but that's the thing with the bridges in Paris; they are all rather similar looking to each other and it's quite hard to tell which is older than the other. The ironic thing is that the oldest one is the one called the "Pont Neuf" - the "New Bridge"! We attached a romantic padlock to one of the newer looking bridges on the riverbank - a footbridge that looked much like London's Millennium bridge. This practice of attaching padlocks to bridges is rather sweet and sentimental but it might not be around for too much longer - already one of the bridges on the Seine was being boarded over to prevent any more padlocks being attached. The weight of hundreds and hundreds of padlocks is too heavy for many of the older bridges so sadly, but inevitably, they have to go.

Across the Pont Alexandre was a large glass greenhouse-like building called the Grand Palais. This huge building looks a bit like London's famous Crystal Palace but with the crucial difference that it is still standing. Even from the top of the Eiffel Tower it looked big. We kept walking down the river bank to the Louvre palace. The Louvre museum itself was closed on Tuesdays so we had a look around the courtyard instead, posing in front of the great glass pyramid above the main entrance to the museum, and next the ornate Caroussel triumphal arch, with a distant view up the Champs Elysees to the much bigger Arc du Triomph. We walked through the courtyards of the Louvre palace, through a courtyard so large and surrounded by four almost identical facades as be a little uncanny. The outside world completely hidden by three storied walls with many many windows. The east end of the palace looks a bit like Buckingham Palace, except there aren't any armed sentries standing in little booths. Opposite the palace was a grand church that looked a little like a old cotton mill with a slightly industrial looking grand central spire flanked by two identical buildings.

Somewhere in our family photo albums is an photo from about 1988 of my brother and me climbing over a large disembodied stone head, laying on it's side in front of an old Parisian church. My guidebook had a picture of the head and said it was next to St Eustache church in Les Halles. On the little tourist map the church was shown a few blocks from the end of the Louvre palace. Interested to rediscover a moment from a family holiday from long ago I persuaded Becky to come with me on a detour away from our walk towards Notre Dame and up in Les Halles, slightly away from the main tourist areas in search of a very large head. Large maps on the street indicated that the Les Halles markets area was being developed in a dramatic looking and major way. A nice new city park named after Nelson Mandela had been built and we found the head on the edge of the park. It had evidently been moved in the redevelopments and wasn't in front of the church any more, but some things hadn't changed as there were still kids climbing over it and being photographed by their parents.

St. Eustache church must be described as one of the hidden gems of Paris. It is fabulous inside with a huge high nave and an enormous pipe organ hanging almost suspended at one end. Unlike Notre Dame there was no big queue to get inside, you could just wander in an admire the place. It surprisingly quiet for such a grand church, but perhaps that's because it's not very famous, and it's probably not very famous because although it has a very grand roof, organ, and windows, it has no huge towers, or a spire or dome. We carried on past the Pompidou Centre, the modern art museum with it's "inside out" design with all the building's pipes and innards on the outside. We went there with school and I remember it being a bit worn out and grubby with escalators that were broken and dirt streaked windows. It looked in a bit better shape now but it still had the big bare square in front of it. It would look great if it's surroundings were more interesting - it would look brilliant suspended above a artificial reflecting pool, like a modernist castle and moat, or surrounded by a row of trees cut into weird shapes. As it is it still looks a little too much like the builders forgot to take down the scaffolding when they finished.


We continued on past the forum Les Halles, a 1970s shopping arcade seemingly so disliked by Parisians they are sticking a big sweepy orange roof over it to make it look a bit more attractive. At last we came to the Ile des Citie, by far the oldest part of Paris, where the city began as a Roman camp on the river, and where it's most timeless landmark sits. Notre Dame cathedral doesn't look quite as big as you might expect, we both said this upon seeing it. But, as Becky said to me, it's not so much the sight of the building as the idea of the building and all of the history, both real and fictional, that has passed through and in front of it. Look at any map of the city from the past centuries and it's there in the middle of the river. Cathedrals like St Pauls in London, and the ginormous Duomo in Milan are much bigger, but they are also much, much more recent. St Paul's is over 300 years old. Notre Dame is nearly a thousand. In Britain - Westminster Abbey aside - we're used to seeing ancient medieval cathedrals in the middle of middling sized towns and cities; York, Lincoln, Canterbury, Winchester etc. Because of the industrial revolution the big Victorian cities tend to have a big town hall in the middle rather than an old cathedral. So Notre Dame is perhaps not so big as you might be expecting but in the summer sun it's a beautiful sight. Paris keeps it's public buildings in excellent condition and Notre Dame gleams with hardly a patch of weathering on it's cream stone. It looks like it could have been built ten years ago rather than ten centuries.

Around the end of the island at the end of the cathedral is a small public park and we took a seat on a bench with possibly the best view from a park bench in the world. Looking almost end-on the the nave end of the building with it's flying buttresses flanked by two rows of trees. Underneath the trees was a small kids playground - swings, monkey bars, a little roundabout. There didn't seem to be too many adults about supervising them, except for a grandfather pushing what I presume was his granddaughter, although it may not have been. Had this been Britain there would have been a low fence round this whole set up and stern signs warning that the area was strictly for children between certain ages. At one point a twentysomething girl hopped up on the bars and posed for silly pictures for her partner, while trying not to flash her pants and thigh tattoos too much. I daresay doing such a thing over here, on a children's playground of all things, would swiftly attract suspicious looks from the community support officers. France seems remarkably unconcerned by child safety paranoia or Heath and Safety in general and certainly not with the details. I nearly brained myself walking down the riverbank on the bottom of a bridge - no signs to mind my head here. You can open the doors of the old Metro trains before they are stopped, and walk all the way to the end of the platform without a fence stopping you from getting to the dangerously narrow bit as there is in London these days.

Maybe were seeing Paris at it's best, on a summer's day in August, but the whole place seemed extraordinarily laid back. Everything is well kept, there's very little litter in the street, or casual graffiti or vandalism. The pavement cafes evidently don't worry too much about having their chairs or tables stolen, and neither do the the parks. We hear a lot about pavement cafe culture in France, and we try and emulate it here, but we have a long way to go; in Paris you start to wonder if anybody in a suit actually has a job, there are that many people sitting around in cafes chatting in the middle of a weekday afternoon. They aren't even eating or drinking much, just talking. On Wednesday, in a nice bistro back near the Eiffel Tower, we managed to eat tea and dessert, and get the bill, in the time it took two professional looking thirtysomething women at the table outside the window to have one glass of lager each. In the middle of a bridge over the river behind Notre Dame sat a pianist tinkling out tunes on an upright piano. The bridge had been closed for him and quite a few smitten young ladies sat on the kerb watching. I daresay they don't close bridges in the middle of Paris for any old busker and this chap was very impressive. He could even have been somebody famous in classical music circles for all I know. He certainly didn't need any sheet music and sounded like he was improvising in parts - whoever he was.

At the next bridge, the Pont Marie, we dropped down into the Metro for the first time, discovering with relief that these days the ticket machines have the option of English, and took the line up to the grand avenue of the Champs Elysees. We could have ridden all the way up to the Etoile - the giant roundabout round the Arc De Triomphe at the top of the avenue but decided to get off half way up so we could stroll up the hill. The Champs Elysees is pretty much the most famous shopping street in the world, and maybe even the most famous street, full stop. As they say "everybody who is everybody" is there, the seemingly endless parade of brands is a visual assault. Oxford Street and Knightsbridge can certainly match up for premium brands, and Broadway in New York is certainly as long, but neither is quite on the scale of this. Certainly there aren't that many actual car showrooms shoehorned into the shop fronts on Oxford Street. It's easy to look at it all with a cynical eye and think it's a bit too gaudy and tacky but here's the thing; all of the gaudiness and tackiness is collected here on the one street instead of being spread around Paris. And it's still in the city, not offloaded to some mall on the ring-road as we are so fond of doing here.

If there is one striking thing about Paris, and the thing that endeared me most to the city, it's how well laid out and pleasingly compartmentalised it is. Each district retains a distinctive unique character and they all have their own landmark to call their own. It's as if some great plan over time has conspired to spread all of Paris's great sights equally about the city and for each great building to be a perfect anchor for it's surroundings - the Eiffel Tower looking down the Champs du Mars and across to the Trocadero, Notre Dame and the old medieval city, the great basilica of Sacre Coeur up on the hill at Montematre, the Pompidou centre squatting among the department stores in Les Halles, even the often derided Montparnasse Tower sticking up on it's own - even when they think they made a mistake in Paris by sticking in a 1960s concrete tower, it's not the kind of planning mistake we make in the rest of the world. It all... works. Here on the Champs Elysees for example, you may be surrounded by the kind of chain stores you can see in any shopping mall - there's even a Marks and Spencers - but looking up the slight hill towards the great Arch made me forget all about that - it's a perfect shopping street, and frankly Oxford Street cannot remotely compare.

One thing that emphatically does not work, however, is the great roundabout round the Arc de Triomphe. It huge, wide, and completely chaotic. Cars, bikes, coaches, buses, vans, trucks, they are all fighting for the right to get there first. Standing there watching the it's hard to know where to look - up at the great arch, or at the traffic bedlam below. My particular favourites are the drivers who honk their horns at others, as if the person they tooted at can ever know who it was in the hoards of vehicles they cut up. Theoretically pedestrians are probably allowed to cross the road on foot (this is France after all, we have already established that they aren't too bothered about petty rules) but it would probably be quicker to find a jetpack and fly across than wait for a gap in the traffic. To get to the middle you need a subway, and wasn't immediately obvious where it was (Paris may be a lovely place but it could use a few more "This Way!" type signs sometimes). We found it eventually by going into the metro station and muddling round the right corridor.

Right underneath the Arch is France's tomb of unknown soldier. Unlike in Washington DC there isn't a sentry guarding it, although there were some police walking nearby. In America patrolling around the Unknown Soldier's tomb is apparently one of the highest honours for a regular rank and file soldier. In France they don't seem to bother at all. I think that says something about how much less they seem to care in France about the symbolic value of the military. In Britain we strike a compromise - there are armed guards but we give them great big fuzzy hats and let Japanese tourist pose for pictures next to them. Speaking of which there were a few people taking selfies of themselves in front of the tomb here. I suppose I'm not the sort to be offended by this sort of thing, these wars were fought so people could be free to act as they please, but I couldn't help but wonder if the selfie has become such an automatic habit these days that people don't stop and take in what they are posing in front of. "Look at me I'm pulling a face at the grave of a poor young man who was shot to pieces and died in a muddy battle field" It doesn't sit right sometimes.

If I had to offer a tip to any visitor to Paris then, after mentioning the speaking German to the hawkers thing, I would suggest going to the Montparnasse Tower. Not only does it give you a seat with a grand view of the Eiffel Tower at night, but it's very good value (13 euros, compare with the £30 they would like at the Shard in London), and they seem delighted to see you. The photographer at the top was practically dragging us out of the lift to take our picture. We had dinner first at the bottom of the tower - this was far more plebian than the night before, a regular chain serving commuters and locals round the Gare Montparnasse, but still the food was excellent. We had pizza and pasta respectively, Becky falling in love forever with France at the sight of a pizza with scallops on top. I was slightly distracted by the fantastically ugly edifice of the Gare Montparnasse out of the window. Whatever other interesting things they did with concrete in the 1960s, they never got the hang of train stations. It looked like the French had ordered something from a Soviet Russian catalogue by mistake and never noticed what an appalling hulk it was until it was finished.

Up the top of the tower were lots of big pictures of the tower and station being built and a birds eye view straight down onto it, and I had to reassess my opinion a bit; I could see what they were trying to do; create a nice rectangular plaza and lots of lovely new offices in the modern style without too much ornamentation. It's just it didn't quite work when looked at from ground level. To the left of the station was a large dark space where the Montparnasse cemetery sits, further round in the same direction, looking a little small, were the two towers of Notre Dame, and on the opposite side the Eiffel Tower lit up in it's full splendour, with a searchlight playing across the sky every few minutes. On each side were large interactive screens explaining the view in detail and pointing out some of the less obvious sights. For example I could see now that our hotel was slap bang next door to the big concrete and glass University campus-like HQ of UNESCO, and also a next door neighbour to the European Space Agency. Presumably employees of these were some of the people who formed the queues in the local patesseries we went in to buy treats every morning. Looked at from a height there seem to be a lot of big churches in Paris and the screens usefully pointed out which ones were which. The other striking thing was the boulevards, blazing with light in the darkness and streaking off into the distance at various angles like great laser beams.


Having crammed in so many things into one day we were a little indecisive as to what to see next. Should we brave the crowds of the Louvre now it was open? There was the Musee d'Orsay, where they keep Van Gogh and his impressionist friends though that had had a monumental queue outside it when we had passed as we walked down the Seine after leaving our padlock on the bridge across to it. An aside - we hadn't left one padlock but two interlocked, the smaller one for both of our late mothers, it seems appropriate to have attached it there as the Orsay was originally the Gare d'Orsay, and my mum's first job in the sixties was in the payroll department of British Rail in Victoria station in Manchester. Maybe it wasn't the bridge next to Notre Dame, but knowing her she'd probably have much preferred to look out upon a museum rather than some old Cathedral.

We could see Montmartre, go for a tour on the river, maybe go to Versailles? Looking on the hotel internet told two useful things; one, that there was more than one entrance to the Louvre museum, most tourists crowd into lines at the famous Pyramide entrance but those in the know stroll in by the side on the river front, or at the far end on the bit that looked like Buckingham Palace. Two; that Versailles was only a few euros and one needed to get and R.E.R. (or commuter) train ticket. We decided to go to Versailles. The Louvre was tempting but it's mostly old masters and historical artefacts and we do have a National Gallery and British Museum of our own full of the stuff. We don't have a unused royal palace, fabled with tales of legendary excess that eventually prompted the mob to charge the gates and take it's occupants off to have their heads chopped off though. Maybe one day, but not for now.

The train to Versailles was packed to the rafters with tourists like us. Even the ones who were speaking French and looked like local commuters turned out to be tourists. The train trundled gradually out the several miles to Versailles past the suburbs, first past lots of modern office blocks with the names of multinationals on the sides, then tower blocks, then slightly older looking streets of towns that must once have been separate from the city before being swallowed up by the suburbs, before rolling into a small station at the end of a branch line. A man outside the station directed us in across the street from the station too a place to buy tickets. Once again pretty good value given the size of the place, and if, like us, you exit the train promptly and walk rapidly you can skip any queue. Opposite the the little tourist ticket booth was a sandwich place selling a huge selection of baguettes for only a few euros. I had a large ham and pickle baguette and didn't feel particularly hungry again for much of the rest of the day. I've never quite understood the appeal of the Subway chain at the best of times - I have never thought that the appeal of being able to specify your own sandwich offsets the amount of time you have to queue while waiting. If it's a choice between waiting while somebody build a sandwich in front of me, and choosing something off the shelf without waiting, I'll go with the latter every time. Plus, in France they give you a baguette in a simple paper bag rather than wrapping it up in several kilos of paper and polythene. And their bread actually tastes of something. And unlike Americans they understand that sticking jalapeno peppers, heaps of onion and vinegar in a sandwich means you can't taste anything else that's in there. And usually makes it a bit soggy.

You approach the gates of Versailles down an ordinary tree lined boulevard such as can be found in thousands of French towns. We sat on a bench under the trees and ate our lunch, watching the crowds from our train come passing by us. As at Notre Dame it was a pleasant place to sit and watch the world go by for a while. The building opposite ran the entire length of the boulevard and a sign at the end said that these were the stable block for the palace. Eventually we picked ourselves back up again and walked on to the palace itself. Even to modern eyes used to stadiums, shopping malls and airports, it looks big. In the 17th century it must have looked unbelievably immense. In past centuries there wouldn't have such large crowds of casually dressed tourists in the foreground or tens of tour buses sat parked on the forecourt either, so the place must have looked even more grand and ethereal. The palace building itself is only three stories tall but it sits on a slight rise so it seems to loom over anyone approaching the great gates. When it was built the huge open space at the front was undoubtedly designed to give off a great air of power and to allow for grand parades and the like. These days the excessive size of the area at least provides plenty of space for the buses to park. Versailles easily wins the title for the most tour buses in one place you're likely to see in the world.

Surprisingly the irritating souvenir vendors had made it this far out of town and were busy hustling their way through the crowd. Fortunately they couldn't make it past the first gates so once everybody had got into the main courtyard we free to pose for pictures in peace. Although, like most of these places if you hang around too long you will be asked to take somebody's photo. In the case of the great golden main gates it seems as though each person then takes the next person's photo in turn. Much like in central Paris everything was very well kept; the golden gates and trim on the roof and balconies gleamed like new. The black and white mosaic courtyard floor looked dazzlingly modern; both in it's preservation and it's modernist design. They could use something like it outside the Pompidou centre instead of plain concrete. The palace and it's grounds may have been built by some slightly (to put it mildly) out of touch, pampered royals, but from the outside it does look almost understated and tasteful.

Inside "tasteful" and "understated" aren't quite the words that come to mind. We looked round the Mesdames’ apartments on the ground floor. These were once the apartments where the ladies of the royal family stayed when visiting the palace and each room was quite ridiculously plush and gaudy; one had a huge chaise longue that looked like a giant marshmallow. Another had a wall of golden trimmed bookcases, another a striking golden harpsichord. Unfortunately the royal men's apartments were closed for restoration so we couldn't see what the royal dauphin and his relatives had in their private rooms. Upstairs we passed the royal chapel (also semi-closed, we could look in but only from behind a rope), passed along a very long corridor lined with statues all engaged in various poses. Some were doing heroic things in war, others clearly were architects building things, others biblical characters, some medieval kings and queens. Just about anyone who was once anyone was represented here somewhere.

Upstairs are where the King and Queen's rooms were and also where most of the crowds were too. I gave silent thanks that we weren't on a guided tour - you would have to be much more interested in French royal history, or 17th century interior design to be able to handle standing still and listening to a guide while hundreds of people crowd around. It's undoubtedly dazzling to behold the interiors of each room, and quite thought provoking to think of all the history that once happened here - this was after all, where the actual Louis XIV slept in a golden room, and the actual bedroom Marie Antoinette fled from when the mob came storming into the palace in 1789. But it is a little exhausting to shuffle through it all, waiting patiently to get through each doorway. Thank goodness then for the giant hall of mirrors. It's huge; big enough to stand without being jostled by others, and so big it looks more like a modern building than a centuries old palace. The mirrors aren't quite as perfect and polished as the kind we can make these days, but it must have been something else to those rarefied few who saw it when it was new. In the day time the mirrors would have reflected the kind of natural sunlight that would have been unprecedented for a room in that era, and in the evening the hundreds of candles in the chandeliers would have been magnified in a way that nobody back then could have imagined was possible, and their flickering would have brought the ceiling paintings to life in a spooky way (Ironically given it's name the room's ceiling is perhaps even more dazzling than the mirrors).

It's not possible to imagine what it must have been like to visit Versailles when it was a palace as a member of the French royal court on the inside of the palace - there are too many visitors brandishing cameras - but the gardens are so huge and sprawling that the thousands of people in them dissipate like ants. The gardens may have been built for powdered bigwigs to prance about in, far from the unwashed massed in the city, but nowadays the gardens clearly belong to the people. No, we can't drive carriages down them like royalty - although there were golf carts to hire, and some mini train things for those who wanted a whistle-stop tour - but the scale meant everybody had lots of space to themselves. From a distance the great reflecting reflecting lake, a giant cross in the middle of the gardens, looked empty but a closer look revealed lots of rowing boats criss-crossing it. I imagine the various different King's Louis would be less than amused to see the plebs messing about on their lake.

The size of the gardens made it a little difficult to judge scale - from the facade of the palace to the great fountain (being refurbished, with a crane and lots of boxes of paving stones) was a short walk. From the fountain down the slight sloping lawn, bordered by statuary, to the great lake was a slightly longer walk. Looking at the map showed that the distance to halfway along the lake was the same as the distance back to the palace. And naturally the lake being a cross shape meant that the far end was doubly far. From the foot of the lake it was half a mile to the east to get to the Petit Trianon, the 'little' farm Marie Antionette built for herself to play at being a rural peasant in. The look of the gardens in Versailles has been copied many times around the world by theme parks, and in car parks and shopping malls, but here what look like chintzy fake statues are in fact genuine old masterworks. Even the side grove leading to the toilets was guarded by a wise looking Greek figure draped in robes. Every junction led off into a maze of 20 foot high avenues of dead straight foliage. I can imagine people who work in garden centres coming to wonder at the rows of trellises disappearing off into infinity. We didn't fancy spending the rest of the day gawping at shrubbery so we sat and had a drink before walking back to the station, passing the city hall on the way, in another town it would probably be the most extravagant building but here it was a little overshadowed.

Confusingly the train back to the city was heading in a great big loop back via the city to the other station in Versailles. So to get back to the city we had to get on board the train to Versailles - but, look carefully tourists, Versailles-Chantiers not Versailles-Chateau. The French seem to given up on using the little television screens on their stations to say where the train currently sat at the platform is going so Becky double checked with one of the cleaners on the station before we got on. Thanks to the double-Versailles problem I imagine the patient fellows of the station must answer the same question from bemused tourists tens of times a day. They didn't seem to mind.

Once back in the city we took the metro round the north side of the city to Montmartre. Montemartre is higher on a hill looking over the city, and it's easy to forget until climbing up quite a long spiral stairs to the ground level. Most Metro stations are quite shallow under ground, except when there is a large hill above them. We were only part of the way up the hill and to get to the top involved two more steep staircases between the buildings. At the top we emerged into a crowded square packed full of bistros, artists tents and souvenir tents; the Place du Tertre, a famous epicentre of artists, buskers and portrait painters. I remembered it well from coming with school, if I knew where to look I could probably find the charcoal caricature of me that was drawn here. We walked around the corner to the grand white catholic church of Sacre Coeur. It's three large, vaguely onion shaped domes are very impressive if a little hard to see as the building is hemmed in by the nearby streets and the only long view is from down the steep steps of the hill in front.

Lots of people were sat around on the steps looking down at the view of the city. A street artist-type was "directing" traffic on the road at the top of the steps, and generally amusing the crowd by hassling passersby. He didn't seem to be making any money funnily enough, and was very bravely trying to walk out in front of some French drivers. A rich looking middle aged group climbed out of Toyota cab before they could be interfered with by the busker. This seemed a bit like cheating; hiring a cab and driving to the top of the hill rather than slogging up the steps, or even riding the little funiculare. But if you can afford a taxi it's a quick way to get around. In front of the church itself a young  Korean or Japanese bride and groom were being briefed by a photographer on their wedding photos. The crowd around politely made way for them to pose for the many photos and at one point the photographers assistant made up for the lack of a breeze by picking up the bride's train and fluttering it artificially.

Inside the church signs asked visitors not to take photos and to maintain quiet. It was gloomy and moody interior, with high soaring symmetrical arches up to the dome. The dome looked smaller than the one in Invalides and was not painted inside. It had an exotic air about it, a church with the slight feel of a Russian orthodox church, or even a mosque. Outside we stopped for a while to look at the view over Paris. To the left we could see down to the dark shed of the Gare du Nord, and further behind up to another hilltop with a park at the top. Behind that another further hill with a larger green space on the side of it. To the right the more familiar sights of the centre; the river and the towers of Notre Dame, with the Montparnasse Tower in the distance. Behind Notre Dame sat a large building with a large white cap on it.

We carried on down the north side of the Montmartre hill past some beautifully picturesque little streets, past a large tower that looks a bit like a lighthouse, past a small museum in the house where the painter Renoir once lived, past a building wrapped in ivy, a small pink coloured cafe, a small vineyard behind the Renoir house, and a little salmon coloured cottage surrounded by trees, actually a nightspot called "Au Lapin Agile" (The Nimble Rabbit). The streets were a lovely place to stroll, without too many crowds even though were were a few hundred yards from the tourist hot spots where the street artists and souvenir shops are. We polished off ice creams and crepes we had bought on one of the bustling streets. The girl behind the crepe counter possibly the only person in Paris who did not figure out that I wasn't French, because she did not suddenly break into English as every other server did when my limited French ran out.

It was about four in the afternoon by this time and were indecisive what to do next. I tentatively suggested something from the guidebook. We could take the metro from the station just on the next street and ride around to the large Pere Lachaise cemetery, where many famous Parisien residents are buried. The book had an entire two pages devoted to the cemetery and it looked like an interesting place for a stroll in the afternoon sunshine. Two names stood out; the grave of Jim Morrison, lead singer of The Doors who died in Paris in 1971, and Oscar Wilde, the great Irish wit who was buried at the very top end of the cemetery. As it turned out the place turned out to be very large indeed, and laid out like a city district, up the the side of a hill and across more acres. This was the second large green hill we could see from Sacre Coeur. We entered through a small corner entrance and walked up a cobbled hill surrounded by trees and hundreds of little chapels. Each one was just about the size for one person to stand inside. Some were in a good condition, others were deteriorating and blacked by grime and dirt. It was quite a striking sight, and something I had never seen before; rows and rows of neat chapels nearly all of a similar style.

Becky took a seat on a bench in the middle of a veranda at the top of a staircase and invited me to carry on at my own speed round the rest of the cemetery. She would rest her legs while I would carry on up the hill to look for some of the famous names. I carried on heading for where the book said Jim Morrison's tomb was. Past a large rotunda, with an eerie looking hill of pollution blackened tombs lined up behind it, and down a side path I found it. It wasn't hard to miss, there was a small group of people in the area, a large tree covered in chewing gum, and a metal fence to keep people from climbing over the stones. The actual stone was off the path and behind two large tombs in a narrow space. It was well decorated in flowers and various photos and other paraphernalia. Two people next to me were wondering what the inscription said (it was something Greek I have later discovered). There was a slight smell of a certain... recreational substance in the air. I carried on up the hill, trying valiantly to follow the map in the guidebook. I walked up a looping path up a hill among trees and onto a large straight street. Gradually I realised I wasn't heading up to the top of the cemetery as I thought, but across the cemetery at a 90 degrees angle to where I thought I was. As is the habit when slightly muddled none of the little signs matched anything on the map. Finally I found one that matched and found where I was. I'd gone past Oscar Wilde and turned back in the right direction. I found a few people standing round the grave of the French writer Marcel Proust, he was covered in metro tickets weighed down with small stones. A few minutes walk away I came to the large stone at Wilde's grave. I was a great rectangular rectangle, with a modern looking winged figure jutting out of one end. It was surrounded by plexiglass to prevent vandalism but there were many lipstick marks on the stone where people had been lifted up to kiss the stone.

We went back into town and found our way around the Eiffel Tower district looking for a restaurant. There were a lot of small bistros and cafes, all with the usual arrangement of chairs and tables outside, occupied by patrons seemingly doing nothing, but not many actual restaurants. We were both pretty much out on our feet by this point and getting a little impatient to actually find somewhere to sit down. Each street was either empty or had a few cafes or a patisserie or two, but no restaurants. Finally we stumbled upon a street with about five of them and thankfully plonked ourselves down and had tea.


For our last day in Paris we made our way back to the banks of the Seine and visited the Musee d'Orsay. We sat outside the front and had something to eat, noticing the complete lack of a queue outside - it was a few hours earlier in the day than it had been when we had walked past two days before. The museum used to be train station and had been turned into an art gallery in the mid-80s. The main concourse had become the admission desk (another place where under-25s could get in for free) and the shop. Above the shop was a series of catwalks at the end the large single-vaulted glass train shed; visitors could walk across the catwalks and peer out of open windows across the museum. There was a huge art-nouveau clock at this end of the station looking out where trains once stood. It was an exceptional space and the actual artworks in the main hall were rather overshadowed by the building itself. Like a cross between the stark utilitarian roof of St Pancras and the ornate detailling of the London Natural History Museum. To the sides of the hall were small galleries holding the older paintings in the collections. The museum was intended to fit in between the classical old masters in the Louvre an the contemporary art in the Pompidou Centre. It contained art from the 19th century and early 20th century, the most celebrated period in French art, when the impressionists came to prominence. At the far end of the hall was a staircase up to a viewpoint up in the rafters looking back down the museum, the staircase was decorated with pictures and paintings of the Great Exposition of 1889 that created the Eiffel Tower.

From the outside the old station building has two clock towers at each end. Walking down one flight of stairs from the view point and round a corner we found ourselves on the inside of the large clock faces. There was a sitting area with large round sofas and a view of the city from behind the giant clock. It looked like it might be just for show but looking closely I could see that they did indeed work. Down the front of the building at the top level was a large gallery of impressionist landscape paintings and we walked down that taking in all the names and views of France in the late 19th century. Down a few floors was a smaller gallery containing still lifes and portraits by Van Gogh, Renoir, Seurat and the like.

We carried on down to the Ile de la Citie and searched for a river tour boat so we could have a ride round the sights from the river. There are several competing tour boat companies in Paris, we could see their various boats sailing past on the river, but could not find any of their docks. We passed by the second hand book sellers on the river bank, they sell books out of large green stands attached to walls. They add to the cultured ambiance of the river as they are actually selling genuine antique books rather than the usual cheap tourist trinkets, but the stands also can get in the way of seeing anything on the river, especially if you are on the short side. We crossed the Pont Neuf, walked down the island for a way, came past the queue for the Sainte Chapelle, a small chapel on the island with a famously ornate interior, and across the river again before finding, down a flight of steps to the river, the dock of the Bateux Parisiens. They offered an hour round trip for about thirteen euros. It started to spot with light rain as we came on board the tour boat, we initially sat back from the front under the edge of the top deck in case the rain came down harder, but then took a chance to sit right at the front, drying the seats and keeping fingers crossed that the rain would stop. The dock was under a bridge and water dripping under the bridge had made the seats wet. By the time the boat pulled away the rain had stopped and we had the best seats in the house (or boat). The British knack of knowing when the rain "isn't going to last" had paid dividends. We could put our feet up on the railing at the front and enjoy the view.

The boat sailed east down the river, past the south side of Notre Dame, before turning round and heading west up to the Eiffel Tower, turning round again and heading back to where it had begun. We passed by many of the sights we had seen in the past two days - the Louvre, the Grand Palais, the Orsay, the many bridges, but with a much clearer and and uninterrupted view. The sky was a little overcast but the sun began to peek out as we neared the end of the tour. The rain came down again little later as we sat outside eating lunch at a nice pavement bistro ("Le Petit Cardinal") but we were safely ensconced under an awning and in no danger of getting wet. I had the duck burger just to see what it tasted like (very nice) and finally some French fries in France. The road was halfway between the university and the river and seemed a bit more like the "real" Paris, rather than the tourist bit or the modern shopping streets. There were handsome old apartment buildings opposite, up to four and five stories, with shutters and a row a balconies on the second floor, and they looked as if they were all occupied. Cars and push bikes came past, and the people looked a little more purposeful and busy, as if they were actually getting on with their real day to day lives. It felt like a very agreeable place to live, the bit of Paris I would buy an apartment in if I had the means and the choice.

Further along the street the guidebook promised the remains of a Roman amphitheatre, the "Arenes de Lutece". Before there was Paris there was the Roman town of Lutetia and this had been it's main arena, at the edge of the town. Sure enough a sign pointed the way down an alleyway under a building and into a large round courtyard. On one side a small section of stone terraced seats underneath a higher grass bank, and the other side more trees behind what looked like some foundation stones. The circle had been cut into slightly by the row of newer buildings but the general shape remained. The main entrance corridor to the arena remained too, including a small lintel on the side where a sign said a statue or lanterns may have once stood. Some small boys were playing kickaround with a football on the sandy floor of the arena and the area was a park, with no restrictions on where to sit or move about. A couple of workers were removing weeds on the terrace. It was a wonderfully unexpected little surprise, and an arresting thought that this was the remains of a building twice the age of Notre Dame, as ancient to the Medieval stone masons as Notre Dame is to us.

We carried on walking through a market square, slightly grubby looking with market stalls being taken down, down some narrow streets lined with cafes, and past the huge mass of the Pantheon, the huge church built by Louis 15th in the 18 century now a national mausoleum. (I had been amused when young why all the French kings had been called "Louis", and had wondered whether it had caused confusion. Could even they remember which one was Louis XV and which Louis IV, which was Madame de Pompadour's King, which one had fought which war and so forth. At least English and Scots kings took different names from time to time). The great dome looks much like St Paul's in London but was for the moment covered in a huge white cap hiding renovation work, as if someone had placed a giant paper cone on the building- mystery solved; this was the curious white edifice that could be seen from Montmartre. There was some kind of reception going on in a building opposite. A Maserati stopped outside and disembarked a passenger before driving away round the corner. The TV news the night before had carried news of the French equivalent of a cabinet reshuffle. Lots of people in suits walking into the Elysee Palace and then walking out again a bit later. Maybe this was something to do with that? There were French flags flying from the building and lots of well dressed people and some photographers. Or it could have been a wedding.

The Pantheon is very impressive but the guidebooks don't mention how impressive it's location is. It's surrounded by very posh looking palace like buildings and a wide boulevard heading down towards the Jardins du Luxembourg. This, you may think, is what St Paul's might look like if London had been rebuilt with great avenues and new building in the 18th and 19th centuries as Paris was. We carried on down the street and stopped for an ice cream in a glamourous ice cream parlour. Further down the road we crossed the road into the Jardins du Luxembourg, the gardens of yet another old royal palace. This one was positively teeny compared to Versailles, just one building of three stories. The sun was out in full force by now and a band was playing on the bandstand. We couldn't linger for long as we had to get back to the hotel for our bags, and then get back to the station for the train home, but it was a delightful spot. There were chairs left out everywhere to sit down on at the end of one of the large lawns bordered by flowers.

Eventually we prised ourselves away and headed back to the nearest metro station, our little Parisien adventure nearly at an end. Back at the Gare du Nord I spent my last few euros on a little Eiffel tower, and we sat and waited for our train looking out over the station from the Eurostar lounge on the first floor with a view of the inside of the station. Becky went for a look around the shops and I sat and watched the trains for a while. It was tantalising; all these high speed trains heading off all over Europe, I would have loved for us to have climbed aboard one and to take off somewhere. Brussels, Lyon, Munich maybe. We had to wait an hour for our call, seeing off two Eurostars ahead of us, and several other trains slid out of the station, off to some other big European city. Next time maybe!

The Message - A Mystery Story

The Message

A Mystery Story

One: Present day.

"Nearly there", thought Jayne Farthing as the trees and houses flitted past her window. She glanced down at her watch, as she had frequently throughout the past twenty four hours, counting down to zero hour; that exquisite moment when she'd be able to shut the front door and flop lifeless into bed. Less than an hour now. That curious form of jet lag that gradually smothers the body while leaving the eyes wide open and stinging was settling over her body. A brief moment of alarm struck her - as it frequently did - what if she nodded off and ended up in Norwich or York, or Lincoln, or wherever it was this train was going. That would be ironic wouldn't it? Tiredness would add hours to her day, forcing her to make the trek back across country... all her carefully calculated hours of countdown would have to be reset to allow for the radically altered circumstances. Suddenly she pulled herself round. Tom would wake her up, of course. She had become rather used to the idea of solitary travel in her work and had forgotten in her moment of alarm that she wasn't alone this time. Tom would know where this train was going, it was the kind of thing he knew. Perhaps it was instictive to all men this knowing where trains are going thing, she thought. She'd never met a man who didn't seem to know where the train was going. Or met a man who didn't zero in immediately on what platform they needed in a station. Or what gate a plane was departing from. They could all do it. No sooner had she begun to utter the phrase "what gate do we want" then the reply would come back in an instant, with precision and clarity "Five!".'Perhaps men have a little Terminator style display in their eyes?' she mused 'a little informatic that tells them useful but ultimately rather non-consequential information'. What a shame it couldn't be tuned to something more life enchancing, like... She couldn't immediately think what actually. Too tired. Too ready for a nice belly flop onto a bed, followed by ten minutes or so of inexplicable mental activity, as if the act of landing horizantally activated a little switch in her head that set off a train of new thoughts. Then... bliss, totally out of it until the evening. Tom might potter about for a bit, arranging bits and pieces in the flat, in his masculine way of trying not to admit that he too was tired. But he too would slink into the bedroom soon enough, hopefully without waking her up.

They yawned their way across the platforms at Piccadilly Station, fumbled around for their tickets as they sighted the platform ticket inspectors who seemed to be now permanent additions to the furniture of the station. Then it was down to the final leg, the last tram of the journey. The journey that began with a taxi in Los Angeles, then proceeded to an airport train, then a plane, then another airport train, then another plane, then a proper train, and now here, the tram across Manchester to home. Home was in Salford, not far from the enormous shiny nearly new Media City that contained the BBC and that Jayne nearly always had to explain that she didn't actually work for. She often thought that it would be a lot easier if she could work for the BBC, just to save the energy and breath of having to explain what "360" Magazine was and what she did there. "360" Magazine was a general interest magazine that had gradually grown in prominence in the past few years. It had begun as a 'Lad mag' called "This And This" - the cover layout would be split vertically between some male preocuppation or the other on the left side - cars, football, or really big explosions -  under one 'This', and under the other 'This' on the right would be some nubile young model wearing very little clothing. Jayne had joined as an intern in the 'Lad' days a few years ago. Some of her more right-on friends had wondered how she'd managed to countenance working for such a repulsive publication, but she'd explained that it wasn't so bad really. For one thing, although the editor had expressly instructed that the name be pronounced along the lines of "This and THIIIIS" in a suggestive tone, she always thought of the name as being "This ANDDDDD this..." in a weary tone. A small act of subversion no doubt, but it gave her satisfaction. She also gained a small measure of amusement by trying to leave her male colleagues guessing whether she might be a lesbian or not by reading the newly printed monthly copy at her desk and pausing to look at the girlie pages with a studious look on her face. 

She'd had some really crappy jobs in her time too and had hated them much more than any job on a magazine with a somewhat unenlightened viewpoint and subjects that did not overlap with her own interests much. At least the magazine was young and fit and healthy. She'd been a receptionist in a GP surgery - hooo boy now there was a job that brought home the grim reality of life to an innocent young twenty something. The inevitable creaking, moaning twilight to most lives would sit in front of her all afternoon in that waiting room. Although her natural compassion led her to believe that most of them were genuinely ill, a small cynical voice in her head would wonder if they didn't really come to sit in the comfy armchairs and read a few magazines (she could never remember seeing "This and This" in the piles though). Or perhaps to compare illnesses with the other pensioners, either to gain satisfaction that some had it worse than them, or satisfaction that they were in fact even more ill than most people and thus more worthy of their GP's time. But it was the mothers who were the worst. The mothers with their obnoxious bratty offspring insisting that their precious darling was critically ill and had to be seen by the doctor this instant. "Do you have an appointment?" Jayne would say with forced politeness, knowing that the answer would be "of course we don't we're far too busy for that" or some such. Of course they didn't. Nobody could get appointments. "Well we usually see Doctor Shaw", they would then say, as if this would make Doctor Shaw suddenly appear by magic like a cartoon witch. "Listen lady" Jayne had wanted to say, in her best Al Capone voice, "there's a gentleman there with only one leg. And a lady there who needs dialysis or she'll die. They have appointments and they're next. So take little Jack, or Harry, or Tarquin, or whatever he's called and do one". She left because she'd become too worried that she'd eventually blurt that out for real. Too blunt, that was her problem, too sarcastic and impulsive. Too ready to say what was on her mind. At least with Tom she'd found someone who didn't seem bothered by her caustic side. Granted it took a lot to excite him in general, but a least, she often reminded herself, he never got the wrong end of the stick every time she asked if the washing up was being done or whether it was being left in the sink as part of some experiment on growing a new species of sink-dwelling life form.

When her friends weren't questioning the ethics of her employer, they were asking about the owner of the magazine, Charles Stanley Wilson-Davis. C.S. Wilson-Davis had distinguished himself against a world of high flying, media savvy, slightly eccentric businessmen like Donald Trump, Richard Branson and Alan Sugar by being extremely normal and ordinary. He had never as far as was known ever tried to fly a balloon across the Atlantic ocean, or turn part of the Scottish coast into a golf course, or even so much as appeared on television. In fact Jayne couldn't really think if she knew that he had done anything of note. Coincidentally he had owned the club where she once worked during university but her she couldn't recall if he'd ever been in. Naturally some of her friends had wondered if he was single and available, but she had pointed out that he never actually appeared in the offices of the magazine, and she had never seen him in person. His email contact was in her inbox, when he sent out various congratulatory messages to his staff, but she had never emailed him back. What exactly could be said; "hello I'm a intern on your magazine and some of my friends were wondering if you'd like me to set you up with them". Perhaps she could have tried it, maybe he was one of those businessmen who took note of cheeky messages and promoted those who sent them for their hubris and for showing a pro-active attitude, or something like that. Perhaps if it was lonely at the top, with all those big secrets that couldn't ever be shared with anybody lest they undermine the authority of the boss. Perhaps she could try sending him a message when she got in on Monday morning?  No. Monday morning would simply be a question of thinking of something to write about. Her holiday perhaps? Well, it would at least be a good backup plan if nothing else occurred. Work these days involved writing a column for the magazine, and in the meantime trying to find a story to fill larger features. If the magazine didn't anything she had written for them she could always see if one of the national papers wanted it. 

"This And This" magazine had become "360" magazine five years ago, when the 'lad' mag boom subsided, probably because the internet had long made such publications obsolete. She had it on good authority that the photographers who did the 'glamour' shoots considered them to be practically identical to shoots for the underwear sections of Marks and Spencers. In fact, one snapper had once told her, after a few drinks, that often one would directly follow on from the other in an afternoon at the studio. They "didn't even bother to change their lighting", he had said. She had been oh-so-tempted to share this little nugget over her various social media presences, but another of her moments of sudden thoughtful paranoia had gripped her and she'd decided against it, lest her job suddenly come under scrutiny. "Magazine columnist fired for exposing shocking professional secrets" she had imagined the headlines. She had first come to writing during the old days, where ironically her presence as one of the few women in the office had counted for her somewhat. Most of the rest of the staff, being young men, had little interest in discussing fashion, grooming or interior design, and even when they did they still coyly deferred to her opinion on such matters, as if she gave their opinions an extra credibility. The only thing she had resisted was joining the All-Female "advice" team who answered various questions from the readership. Strictly speaking this team was supposed to answer all kinds of questions but in reality they were Sexual Agony Aunts. While Jayne had given off the impression that she was a little bit too prudish to join in with the weekly meetings of the three "advisors", it was more to do with her general lack of experience with the subject. It would have been like advising on a Used Car problems page, she had thought; although in her time she had passed her test, bought a car, and even driven it in adverse weather, there wasn't much she could say on the subject besides the basics.

Her weekly column had begun back then too. She had called it "The View From the Afternoon"- partly as a nod to the Arctic Monkeys, partly because that was the time of day it was usually written (she was not a morning person), and partly because the management had wanted her to call it "Farth-ing Around" - with the 'Fart' part of her surname highlighted in a different colour, and only the hip reference to a popular band had persuaded the Editor to take her idea instead. She had consented to having a picture of her pulling a flirty face next to the headline because it was so hilariously unlike her usual sober personality. She held out hope that at least some of her readers could detect her hidden satirical intent after reading her words and than looking back at the picture. Now she wrote for an altogether more grown-up magazine, but the content hadn't changed much - what was happening in town this week, gig reviews, random observations on life, and television reviews. Quite alot of television reviews actually. One problem with being an evening person was a complete inability to switch off at the end of the day without watching a few hours of emotionally draining tv drama. She'd been particularly taken by the number of dramas suddenly being set in the 1920s. Maybe it was because had she been a female newspaper columnist back then she could have been as famous as Dorothy Parker, and her friends would be more concerned about hanging around with her than asking after the man who paid her salary.

The tram drew to a halt and they lugged their bags out of the doorway and onto the platform. It was spotting with a very, very light rain. 

"That fine rain" said Tom in his pitch-perfect impression of Peter Kay. Jayne smirked lightly at this. Bless him, she thought, even after an overnight flight from America he can still raise a smile. 

"Want to get a taxi?" he said in a non-committal sort of way. They had been together long enough for him to know that neither of them thought it was worth driving round when their flat was only a few minutes walk away. The wind blew the gradually increasing rain into their faces as they headed to their apartment building. The buildings tended to funnel the wind into a much stronger gale, whipping around the corners, disturbing the leaves on the ground and blowing the drizzle into Jayne's glasses. She pulled them off and swished the rain off on her clothes. Tom was walking slightly ahead and reached the front door first. Went inside and opened the post box - she was glad he did this, as she always had a slightly paranoid feeling that some completely unexpected bill or a summons to serve on jury duty would be lurking inside. This time it seemed to be no different; 

"Usual advertising" said Tom flicking through the pile of post 

"Green Party have been round again", "ah" he reacted to one flyer that had made it into the post delivery rather than being pushed under the main door "Would you like a takeway?" he asked in a genuine tone that one again made her smirk. 

"Well, perhaps today it might be a good plan" she replied. "Everything that's edible in this flat is frozen". 

"Mmmm, yes it's a possibility". 

"Ah" he again said, picking out an envelope and handing it to her "for you".

'Miss Farthing' read the envelope, in neat biro, above the address. She regarded it with a moment's curiosity. Most of her work-related post was directed to the office but occasionally some came to her home address. Usually it was some kind of invitation to a album launch, or some wannabe film director trying to drum up support for a new film project. They got their bags into the lift and she quickly opened the envelope. For all that she was suspicious of the post box bringing some unwanted complication into her life, and that feeling was being amplified by the extreme need to slump into untroubled sleep for a good afternoon, she had to know what was in there. It was a single A4 piece of paper folded neatly into three. The lift binged to a stop at the 10th floor and they stepped out and made their way down the corridor to number 103. Jayne walked with her bag studying the paper and it's curious handwritten message.

"Look at this." she showed it to him as he opened the door.

4176576677666N

7157575757757W

Look into it.

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Two: Eighty years earlier.

It was very early in the morning and the crowd who had gathered outside Paris at the air field shuffled and fidgeted to keep warm. Many of them were used to being up before dawn for their jobs, and some of them were undoubtedly were reminded of standing on the platform waiting for their early morning train. This, however, was a Sunday, a day when most would only be out of bed and getting dressed in their church clothes once the sun was high in the sky. This Sunday, however, was different. There was a murmur throughout the crowd, the promise that they could be witness to the beginnings of a historic event that, if it succeeded, could bring glory to the whole of France. To think, the two heroic aviators who were soon to appear in their plane could be in America within a day and half and be the toast of the entire world. Both were already well known; both decorated heroes of the Great War, national heroes. Photographers set up their equipment to capture the potentially historic moments. The more complicated movie cameras were also being set up to bring the pictures to millions around the country who could not be there in person to witness the event. 

Soon enough the moment the crowd had waited for arrived. Here it was; the boxy white plane that was soon to take off on it's journey. Until now most of the interest had been about the pilots, their previous war records, their personal lives, their interests and opinions. Now thought the crowd was excited by the appearance of the machine. A squat, bulky, brilliant white plane, elegant but sturdy looking. They looked at it as though it was an exotic zoo animal, except instead of feeling superior they felt an odd feeling of inferiority. It was as if the future had arrived and was being wheeled in front of them, a future where machinery would be far more powerful and capable than man. The two pilots appeared soon after, looking small next to their plane, and wrapped in heavy flying suits to keep them alive at altitudes where their plane would be in it's element.

The two men walked around the plane with purpose but also with nervous steps, as if they knew a few minor preflight checks would be of little consequence when set against the might of the Atlantic Ocean and the full power of the storms, wind and rain. What would matter was whether or not fate was on their side, not whether they were good but whether they were lucky. Already, only seven years after the event the world was beginning to forgot the first two men to fly over a great ocean. Two Englishmen in an old war plane had flown from Canada to a crash landing in Ireland. They had been flying with the prevailing winds, and had several times come close to death, but fortune had been with them. Even when they bellyflopped into a peat bog they emerged unscathed and were soon being received in London with knighthoods, awards, dinners and speeches. But that seemed a lifetime ago now. It was as if the whole challenge had been reset to new rules; instead of a lucky chance the great prize that had been offered was for a flight from city to city, airfield to airfield. No lucky crash landings, this had to be a fully controlled flight, hopefully, in the eyes of the crowd, with a heroic overflight of Manhattan by the two Frenchmen.

At last the time came. It had been well under an hour since the first of the crowd began to assemble till the time for takeoff but the heavy weight of the occasion had seemed to stretch the hour out - many in the crowd would have sworn it was getting on for at least nine o'clock rather than barely six. From the outside the take off looked fairly ordinary. The plane made slow run around the field as the pilots evidently were checking their instruments and supplies, and then it turned into the wind, accelerated, rolled and bounced into the distance where it slowly rose into the air, accompanied by an approving cheer from the crowd. Inside the plane things were a lot more fraught. The two pilots knew from experience what they were getting themselves into much more than the happily ignorant crowd watching from across the field. Their plane was very heavy. Too heavy. They had tried to lose some of their weight by jettisoning non-essential supplies. When that didn't seem enough they had started on what by any measure were an essential supply; food. Sure, both were veterans of combat missions during the war, but this was a mission beyond even their experiences. Missions in the war had lasted hours, over the ground, not over a whole day over water. The enemy during the war had been other pilots, and with enough experience they became predictable. The greatest danger came in the earliest missions of a pilot's wartime career, when they did not know from where to expect shots to be fired, and did not know the angles that planes could turn at, where the enemy was likely to appear from. The weather was another entirely unpredictable animal entirely, there was none of that human predictability, the weather could be benign or fearsome, with no warning at all when it would change. The weather over the ocean was a great unknown; neither of the flyers had any experience of at all.  

They would fly north to coast of France, and then intercept the south coast of Ireland for a few miles, taking a final reading of their heading before setting out into the void. Concentration would be of vital; the pilot would have to maintain constant monitoring of the instruments lest he let the plane lose too much speed or tip over at an angle that was too extreme to recover from. The navigator would have to maintain the critical calculations of speed and time, to work out the distance travelled, and factor in the force of the headwinds they were bound to encounter pushing against them, slowing them down. Across the featureless desert of the ocean the calculations to determine the direction they were heading would be a matter of life and death; they only had enough fuel to last the shortest possible distance across the ocean, they could not afford to get lost. All of this would be hard enough in theory, in practice, with the deafening roar of their engine, and the freezing cold wind blasting into them, it would be nearly impossible.

Far below, on the desolate coast of the southern end of Ireland, a few hardy souls caught sight of the adventurers above them. The sky was clear enough to show the bright white speck of the plane above them. Even if they did not know the names of the two crew members aboard, they would have known their mission. The great prize for the Atlantic crossing was world news, and the current obsession of the newspapers. Had the flyers been Germans maybe the reporters would have been a bit more muted in their interest, but the two Frenchmen had been heroes of the Allied cause during the war, and had become the darlings of the press. Even out here in the remote farms at the southernmost tip of the edge of Europe people knew what they were trying to do. What they did not know, or perhaps fully appreciate, was that unless the mission was a success they could be the last people on Earth to see the plane and it's occupants. The only way to know if their flight was success would be when they reappeared over the coast oppossing them across thousands of miles of ocean. If any problem arose there would be no way for the crew to contact anyone else, their fate would be forever a mystery.

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Three: Present day

Jayne sat on the side of the bed with the piece of paper. 

"A tip off?" she asked Tom, looking for something reassuring to emanate from his usually calm voice. 

"Maybe" came the no-committal reply from the bathroom. 

"Well I am a journalist" she prompted again. She had been taken slightly aback by the message. It wasn't scary just very strange and she was trying to rationalise it's sudden presence in the post box.

"You are"

"I've never seen this sort of thing before"

"No?"

She sighed a little. Tom was a laid back character but at times like this he was a little too laid back. She wanted him to display a little more interest in the mysterious letter she was holding in her hands. He walked in, wearing the jogging bottoms and a t-shirt he'd changed into after they had got, laid down on the bed and pulled the cover over himself. 

"I don't know about you" he wheezed in a low groan "but I've been awake for god knows how many hours now and it has been an almighty effort just to take my clothes off and not just fall asleep in those jeans" He looked almost comatose already. She felt submissive at the sudden bluntness and lack of affection in his voice. Poor thing, he had after all lugged her stuff around two airports and on and off several trains and done so completely uncomplainingly. He'd also plugged back in the TV, the wi-fi, switched the boiler back on, and run the taps in the kitchen and bathroom to clear out any gunge. Perhaps he was a little too tired for any mysteries right now. She puzzled over the numbers for a few minutes hoping for a moment of inspiration. 

She ran through the obvious choices; a telephone number? A code substituting numbers for letters? Not immediately obvious. Lottery numbers? Oh... dear she wished she hadn't thought of that one. 

Superstition had kept her from ever playing the lottery. The logical part of her mind - the part that kept her away from miracle diets and taking the Search for UFOs programmes on television that Tom would occasionally watch seriously - told her that they would never ever win the lottery. But the irrational part, the part that dated back to her childhood pretending to be a witch and zapping her dog trying to turn it into a dinosaur, told her that as soon as she bought a lottery ticket the number she used would immediately be earmarked for a future jackpot, thus forcing her to keep playing the lottery forever more. She'd heard lots of talk about how winning the lottery ruins lives, alienated friends and sets families against each other, and she'd written about such a ruined lottery winner once, but didn't believe a word of it. "Bring on the moolah" would've been her reaction. It would be nice to be freelance, no more office. She'd have her own office, maybe with one of those hip art-gallery/cafe places next door. Maybe she'd have it on the top floor of a skyscraper in Manhattan. Call the cafe "The View From the Afternoon". Be the toast of New York City, win a Pulitzer prize perhaps, go to all the premieres and hob nob with the big shots listening in on the gossip in her innocent way. Maybe then have a side career writing bitchy Roman-a-Clef tales about the great and the beautiful under a mystery sleazy alter ego. Enjoy reading the reviews as the media and general twitterati pondered her identity. She'd be like Banksy, or Belle Du Jour, only without as much graffiti or sex. She'd drag Tom along of course, get him smartened up with a dashing waistcoat, and just maybe see if she could find him some kind of of hat.  

Tom was breathing rhythmically and heavily next to her. The precursor to the louder snoring that would shortly follow. Damn it, she was getting a bit aroused now, thinking about being Mr and Mrs. Artsy-Fartsy in New York with a very big luxurious bed and now he was out of it, maybe she could try and wake him... No. Back to the present, she was exhausted and still wearing the grimy clothes she'd put on in a hotel room in Los Angeles so many hours ago. She stood up, pulled them all off, placed the paper carefully on the dresser, thought for a moment about rummaging for her pyjamas, then went to clamber under the sheets. A thought struck her and she walked into the living room. Ah, the curtains were still wide open, she immediately doubled back, grabbed a towel from the bathroom, and went back into the living room, hoping that none of her neighbours in the block opposite had been looking at her inadvertently flashing them. No, daft, another bit of paranoia, it was the middle of the afternoon, clouds would reflect off the windows, nobody could see in. The sudden appearance of the strange bit of paper had suddenly made her even more jumpy. Maybe somebody was watching? The same person who had left the message? Perhaps keeping her under surveillance before they unleashed the next set of instructions in their mysterious plan. 

She found her phone, turned to the camera, walked back in the bedroom and took a photo of the message. "If that's gone when we wake up..." she thought, quickly turning her phone off and placing it under her pillow. "One step ahead guys" she also thought. She undid the towel, tossed it aside and climbed into bed. "This" she thought as she drifted off "is a hell of lot better than sleeping on a plane seat".  

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Four: Two weeks earlier.

Jayne never used to like flying. She'd used to think that it was because she'd only been on a plane for the first time when she was eighteen. That had been with several friends on a trip to New York. She hadn't slept the night before, not so much from the fear but from pondering the ease at which she could have simply got up, got in the car, and driven away somewhere. It was a holiday, and she was torn up thinking that she was putting herself through this torture for nothing but a silly holiday with friends. She didn't resent her parents much but she'd wished they hadn't been so devoted to caravan holidays in Cornwall and had taken her on a plane at some point during her childhood. She could have got the monkey off her back while she was still too young and dumb to know any better. By the time she was eighteen her sense of superstition was already well formed and she was dreading her first air journey. She was sure something terrible was waiting for her on that flight to New York. And New York? Why did her godforsaken friends want to go all the way to New York? Couldn't they have wanted to go somewhere nice and close in Europe like Milan, or Oslo or somewhere. 

As it turned out she had smothered her dread under a coat of pretend tiredness and smiled her way through that first flight. But the fun week they had spent in New York had not quite quelled her sense of unease at boarding planes. The night before she'd come back from New York once again found her dreading the journey back. The monkey had climbed from her back but she was still worried. She was disappointed in herself, she thought she was holding onto a superstition imposed on her by her upbringing, but it turned out she was just scared and irrational. It eventually took several years to get over her unease, and to stop feeling relieved at the end of each flight that nothing bad had happened. Tom had been a major part in this; he wasn't scared of much and especially not flying. He had once been on a gap year adventure to somewhere in deepest Africa and told stories of getting on planes with his mates that had standing passengers, where the doors weren't shut until the plane was lining up to take off, where the Captain offered up sincere sounding prayers before the flight. He'd been on a flight in a storm, he'd once told her, where the seatbelts had been necessary to keep everybody in their seats and not flying into the overhead lockers - lockers that had all flown open and disgorged their contents. Jayne had listened to all of this and had resolved to stop being such a wet blanket. On their first holiday together she had sat next to him on the flight and thought hard about bouncing around in turbulent air above the African savannah, imagining that the little wobbles from the plane were in fact huge drops and bumps. She'd looked every so often at the exit doors and thought a sense of security that they had been closed at the correct time. And, every time the cabin crew came past she felt reassured that they were clearly not relying on divine guidance to do their job properly. 

This new sense of optimism; the realisation that things could be a lot worse, had helped her out enormously. Even now, in the departure lounge at Manchester airport looking out across the gates, Jayne thought that the plane, the sight of which had once sent a flutter of gooey unease through her stomach, was probably in much better shape than most planes in the world. "At least this is Manchester", she thought, "not Addis Abbaba or Kinshasa or Khartoum or somewhere" ("African geography" she also thought "is not my strong point"). She still felt a little bit tense that she still had to go through this little routine of reminding herself that she was relatively safe, rather than simply being able to relax and get on with things without these little routines. She even felt a twinge of guilt at assuming that all flights in Africa must be dangerous. But before she could begin to tie herself up in knots over this swirl of thoughts Tom spoke;

"Your quiet"

"Really?" she was snapped out her reverie and realised why he was asking this. She'd been lost in thought. She might even have been asleep for a moment.

"Yes, are you ok?"

"Well we have already been up for half a day". It was almost true, but sounded a bit soft, she immediately thought. All they'd done was get up, ring for a taxi and been stood in queues for twenty or so minutes. It was hardly high exertion. 

He considered his reply;

"That's the modern way. Got to get up early to come here and sit around waiting".

"The waiting is quite reassuring really" she said "think I'd be more worried if we could just get on and go"

"Well, I think I'd prefer that they checked all their switches now rather than in threehours" he mused.

Three hours later they were high above the Atlantic ocean, the water below sparkling in an seemingly endless carpet of blue flecked with white specks shimmering together as if on an endless repeating loop. The sun glinted off the wingtip outside of Jayne's window and gave the rest of the matte grey finish of the rest of the wing an eerie glow. The wing flexed up and down gently; there had been clouds over the sea below earlier and the ride had been a bit bumpy but now the sky below was clear and the ride was smooth - probably the smoothest Jayne could remember. She had tried to occupy her time by watching films and then reading but now listlessness was setting in. Tom was sat beside her reading one of his beloved fantasy books - the kind with swords, battles, kings, queens and whatnot. She could never really get into them, and she had tried, and generally waited for them to be turned into television series. She sighed and looked back out of the window again. She liked to stare out of the window on planes even though there wasn't much to see except the ocean. She reasoned that since she was paying a reasonable amount of money for the "privilege" of sitting in an uncomfortable seat, bored out of her mind, for hours on end, she might as well take in the one thing that was different. She could watch movies at home, she didn't always see the middle of an ocean from 30,000 feet above. The small pieces of ice in the window pane glinted against the sun, a reminder of how cold it was outside. She plucked the cushion from under her feet, propped it against the window frame, laid her head on it and closed her eyes.

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Five: Eighty years earlier.

They had made good progress, the navigator calculated. They were still on course and, crucially, were still within their fuel 'window' that would allow them to reach the land in America. Admittedly, he thought, they wouldn't exactly be home free if they had to descend and look for a suitable field to land in - that would still be very difficult to achieve and even if they landed if one or both of them was injured in a remote place they could starve to death long before anyone found them. This was his military training speaking, he never took anything for granted until the mission was successfully complete. Even though things were going well now things could still go wrong right up until the final moment. At least, he thought, the radio still appeared to be working, even though out here over the ocean there was nobody to call. Plus the weather was clearing up, the clouds from the night before had dissipated away and they could see for miles ahead. The ocean below looked calm and he could see the wave tips breaking below. 

They both had to keep their thoughts on the increasingly spectacular view to themselves. Aside from notes passed between them along the floor of the cockpit there was no way to talk to each other. Not only was the noise from their engine so great that there was no way to hear but they were solidly strapped in they could not move far enough to reach each other. The freezing cold onrush of air was mostly directed over their heads but still any unprotected skin was in danger of being frostbitten. The navigator adjusted his goggles to scratch an itch on his nose. He had to be careful, though he did have a spare set, and only one functioning eye to protect, he still did not want to lose one in the powerful slipstream of their plane. He was surprised by how warm the air felt to how it had before.

One of the dials was twitching. Directly infront of him on the panel a pressure gauge was flicking backwards and forwards between two points on the dial. He looked left and right across the wings to see if he could see anything that was causing it. He was confused - it was not something he had ever seen before. There was no obvious problem - the sky was clear , the wind had died down, the other dials were all fine. He looked around again. The air was definitely warmer now, almost as though he were sat in the plane on a summer day at one of the air shows. The noise of the engine was dying down too. He could hear it as a low drone rather than an overpowering rumble. In front of him his companion was still sat as he had been for hours at the controls. Only now his right hand was floating up at the side of his head.  He seemed to be inspecting his gloved hand, and looking at it as though it was a precious vase, turning it slowly round in the sunlight. There was no noise now, just complete silence. The sea seemed blurred in his vision, and seemed to be pulsing in time with his heartbeat. 

He could see the propeller rotating round slowly. He was intrigued; why was he not worried by this? Something extraordinary was happening, either to him or to the plane. They had been on a journey into the unknown to begin with, and had expected to encounter strange phenomena but this was beyond anything he had anticipated. Was he asleep? Had he been gassed by the fumes from the exhaust? Had his water can somehow been spiked with drugs? It was a concern they had during the war in case of sabotage by an undercover agent infiltrating their airfields. Had someone somehow poisoned them? He was still unnaturally calm as his vision narrowed and his eyelid began to drop. He shouted out to his companion;

"Charles!" 

His voice sounded slow and dropped down deep. He tried again but found his mouth frozen in mid breath. The warm feeling of being sedated flooded through him and his remaining good eye closed. Inexplicably he thought he could see the underside of what looked like another plane above them. It was huge, silver and astonishing. He was definitely drugged, he thought. Sluggishly his final thought, that seemed to stretch out forever and repeat endlessly in his head was "Damn it".

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Six: Eighty years later.

She solved the problem by chance. They were coordinates. They had to be, the number of numbers fit the pattern that coordinates had perfectly. It was almost too easy really. Jayne wondered if it was really that simple. The letter had been neatly folded in a plain white envelope, a plain sheet of A4 with no other identifying marks at all. The message was written neatly in what looked like blue biro. Looked at closely there was no sign of fingerprints or any smudge marks that might indicate who had written it. There was just the stream of numbers, and the terse message at the end. Clearly it was intended as some kind of clue, or tip for her to follow. What else could it be? She had on one or two previous occasions been given such tips. But they had been much more specific than this one had been and were more pertinent to her job; once a quite well known band had tipped her off that they would be playing a secret show in the city centre one evening, and she had been the only journalist she could recognize at the gig. On another occasion the famous chef of The Sunset Terrace, Michel Vigier, had dropped his card in her office mail, asking if she wanted an exclusive interview. Naturally she had, and being somebody who could barely boil an egg without leaving half of her kitchen in flaming ruins, had then crammed all afternoon to learn as much about food as was possible. She had led the interview by confessing her frank ignorance of cookery and had immediately charmed the grizzled old chef by asking him how he stopped himself spilling rice everywhere or scalding his fingers with boiling water. As a result she'd been given a free dinner at the restaurant and earned some serious respect from some of her foodie friends. She had half-wondered if this was Monsieur Vigier trying to contact her now about something more serious. Or perhaps Charles Stanley Wilson-Davis, her mysterious boss, sending her off on a secret assignment?

She had worked out that the string of numbers were coordinates when looking on her computer for the new address one of her old university friends had moved to. She was married to some big-shot surgeon and had clearly warmed to the idea of moving out to suburban Cheshire to 

show it off. Jayne had plugged her address into the WorldVisit maps program to see exactly where she was expected to go, but also to reassure herself that her old friend's house, while palatial and luxurious, was also terribly vulgar and gauche and not the kind of place where Jayne was likely to be hit with sudden pangs of jealousy. while looking with interest at the house she had noticed the string of map coordinates at the bottom of the screen, noticed how many numbers there were, noticed that there were two strings of numbers, and had practically tripped over her own feet with excitement trying to find the letter. Carefully she'd typed the sequences of numbers into the computer, hit 'search' and waited for a few moments to see where they were directing her to. The map had zoomed out, the globe on the screen had spun, and zoomed into down on the coast of the eastern United states. To be precise they had zoomed into the heart of a forest in the bottom corner of the state of Maine. Her heart had skipped with excitement and curiosity at this unexpected result. The middle of a remote forest? She had thought to herself. Why has somebody left me a message with a set of coordinates directing her to look at a forest in America? That had been several hours ago, in the middle of the afternoon. Tom had been out at the time, when he had come back in she'd announced her discovery to him and immediately asked him if the location meant anything to him. He'd asked her why she hadn't texted the place to him as soon as she had worked it out, since he could perhaps have gone to the library and maybe found some book about the forests of Eastern America or some such thing. She'd replied that she'd wanted to have a think about whether she really was on the right track. She'd put the numbers into all kinds of different web pages; unit conversions to see if they were measurements; she'd transposed the letters with numbers and fed the letters into anagram solvers and translators; she'd even added the numbers all up to see what the result was. The only thing that seemed to match perfectly was the coordinates. However they seemed to be drawing a mysterious blank, an insignificant looking patch of forest.

Tom had looked at the computer screen where she still had the location pinpointed. 

"Have you tried reversing them?" he'd asked.

"Reversing?" she'd questioned.

"Yeah, maybe the person who did this got mixed up. Put north instead of South. Or west instead of east."

"Maybe"

"I do it all the time" he'd added. "Transposition error" he then added with a flicker of a smile. "You never read that flying manual I found in that second hand shop did you?"

"You know, I didn't make the time for it" she'd replied sarcastically.

"I know. It sounds really nerdy but I thought it had loads of interesting stuff in it."

Jayne had grunted a non-committal reply. Her way of humouring him when he got on one of his intellectual high horses. 

"Like how we swap things round without noticing. How extraordinary mistakes just pass right in front of us without noticing." 

Jayne had considered this. "So the person who found their way to posting this message in my postbox was meticulous enough to find me, to write their message neatly and fold it away without leaving any obvious trace of who they are, but had got the numbers and letters mixed up?"

"It's possible"

"Possible yes, but I think if I hadn't left any other clues on the message then I would be very careful to get it right."

She'd tried swapping the North and West on the coordinates for South and East, and had ended up in the Pacific Ocean west of Chile, and a desert in deepest China. Tom had reacted to this by saying that the two possibilities were just as promising as somewhere in America. Jayne hadn't been so sure. The terse sentence at the end of the message was in English, not Chinese or Spanish. Admittedly it was a tenuous connection, but still, if this mystery person was trying to send a tip-off to her about something then she guessed it was more likely to be in the relatively easy to reach part of America than the middle of China, or far out to sea at the other end of the world. 

Now several hours later they were sat on the sofa, watching TV and filling themselves with a Chinese takeaway. Neither of them had been bothered to go to the supermarket since their return from California. There was a small corner shop nearby, that somehow had not been overtaken by one of the big chains, and that had serviced their needs for the time being. Mainly this had consisted of coffee in order to maintain wakefulness in the morning. Even with the excitement of the message appearing in the post box Jayne had struggled to get out of bed this morning. It was a Friday - she had booked the day off before they had left in anticipation that she would be reluctant, very reluctant, to drag herself into the office on a Friday, while jet lagged and with nothing much to write about. Now, potentially, she had something to write about but was confused as to what to do. Was she in danger from whomever had dropped the message off? If she wrote about the message publicly would the person who dropped in off take some kind of offence? And if she wrote about the message what were her readers supposed to make of it? No, it would have to wait until she could work out what to do about it. They couldn't jump back on a plane and go back to America, not without some kind of cover story at least, and she didn't usually get those assignments. She was the girl about town, and although she hated the term, she had to admit she was also the "gossip" columnist, albeit the hipster gossip columnist. Unless a certain French chef she was friends with would invite her to review his New York restaurant. And even if he did it was a long way to Maine from Manhattan, and a hell of a drive to cram into the miniscule number of days the magazine would doubtless allow her to have off for a trip to America. And even the senior feature writers only got the bare bones expenses paid for them - the money was saved for when they landed a big name guest contributor who would only agree to write and article for them if everything, even the taxi fare to the hotel, was paid in full. A thought struck her.

"Do you think I should ask my boss?" she asked Tom

"About that message?"

"Yes, do you think if I just cut to the chase and tell Mr. Wilson-Davis about it? The message? Say I've got a mysterious set of coordinates in my postbox, that I think could be in America, and could I please go and have a look?"

"Well you're within your rights I suppose. Nothing ventured and all that"

The bottle of lager Jayne had swilled down with her chow mein was beginning to work it's magic and she only prayed that she didn't end up downing several more and then drunkenly firing off an email to the owner of her magazine asking if she could go on a hair brained jaunt to America.

"I mean" she added "it is weird, by any standard. You don't get many random tip offs." She thought again

"Maybe he did it!" she exclaimed "Maybe he's trying to tell me something. He must be able to get hold of my address anyway. He is the boss. Plus he's a bit of a recluse, a bit strange and eccentric. Perhaps it's his new tactic; randomly send some hints to his writers and see what happens".

Tom considered this "I thought eccentric rich kids just did the whole Howard Hughes thing. You know, try to invent something, build a big house and then live in one room, build a balloon and try and fly across the Atlantic single handedly".

"Well I had already thought of that. But Branson's already done that hasn't he? And the one thing about the rich is they hate to copy each other, if you're going to be eccentric then it must be your own eccentricity".

"You get quite loquacious when you're smashed, darling" he grinned.

"Oh go away I've had one. One"

"Precisely!"

"Maybe I should make it two" she got up.

"Get me another one while your up"

She walked into the kitchen and opened the fridge. There wasn't much in there except for the case of lager they had bought from the shop around the corner. They had mutually agreed that the weekend would be a deliberate wash out, that they wouldn't do much except get drunk and watch TV. She hadn't expected to have started at quite such a serious pace but there hadn't been much time for drink in Los Angeles. They had spent the past week diligently getting up for breakfast at their hotel, and setting off in a determined frame of mind trying to make the most of their day and trying to see as many sights as possible. Hangovers would have been detrimental to their ability to act as tourists as efficiently as possible, and they would have missed breakfast. Not only that, but by the time they had returned to their hotel after a solid day's sightseeing they didn't have much energy for drinking. And the need to fill their faces with the best greasy food LA could offer trumped the need to get drunk. They had even managed to get in a decent amount of holiday romance, even if she had to admit to herself that more than once she'd consented to hotel room sex because American prime-time TV was so dull and crammed full of adverts. She wondered whether it was a good idea to tell Tom this fact as she walked back in the the living room.

The hour had passed and he was now watching a true crime documentary on one of the many faceless channels that lurked around the two hundred and something numbers on their channel listings. When they had first met she had been quite cheered to meet somebody else who would sit though programmes about infamous murder mysteries. Most of her group of friends had dismissed them as entertainment; something "for ghoulish curtain-twitching types" as one had put it. Jayne had to admit they had a point, but the journalist in her couldn't resist tales of long-unsolved cases being solved by dogged investigators tenaciously chasing down obscure leads. She loved the often random and arbitrary nature that the breaks in the cases would often office. She was fascinated by the idea that the world could be so stuffed full of unsolved mysteries and untold secrets. There was a young lady on the screen now, identified by a caption as a journalist from a local newspaper, standing in an empty courtroom recounting details of the case. Jayne liked the look of her, she only looked young, but she was smart and well spoken with a hint of confident sass in her demeanour, someone in other words who Jayne aspired to be like.

Tom spoke up; "What if it turns out to be something serious?"

Jayne looked at him quizzically "what, something like this? A murder?"

"Well they do it sometimes don't they? Leave clues to people? Like the Zodiac and his letters."

"True, but he said who he was, well he said he did it. This one hasn't. It's just numbers. She paused for a moment.

"They go for attention" she added. "It's too vague."

"I wouldn't rule it out is all I'm saying." he said with an air of authority. His tone grated on her slightly.

"I haven't. But if it is some kind of evidence it's got my fingerprints on it. Not much use now."

"Well, that's not quite true is it? They'd still have the prints of the other guy." He'd paused the tv now and was getting into the swing of a conversation that Jayne didn't really want to pursue. She didn't like where it was heading. Didn't like the prospect of something sinister and possibly terrible being at the end of all this.

"Deep in a forest. Looks ideal for somewhere there might be some evidence in a murder or disappearance. Middle of nowhere, off the beaten track."

"Can we not go there? Please, one step at a time."

He frowned and looked back at the tv. 

"Ok, let's see if we can do a little research. Maybe see if there's anything famous about this place". He opened his second beer and reached for more takeaway. "You want some pork?"

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Seven: Two weeks earlier.

It was quiet. Very quiet. Jaynes' eyes opened and eyed the ice on the window. Or rather, the lack of ice on the window. The ice crystals had melted on the small plastic inner window pane. Wow, she thought, asking herself rhetorically, "we're here already?". She blinked heavily and sat up pulling her head away from the window. She could see outside. They were definitely not there. The ocean still sat there below her window, only the twinkling motion of the waves was absent. Jayne darted around to look at Tom. He was still reading his book. He was still, and quiet. Everything was quiet. The roar of the engines was gone. She waved her hand in front of Tom's face. Nothing. An icy chill of panic ran through her, the kind of which she had never previously experienced. What was going on? Had something gone wrong with the plane, were they gliding silently through the air heading for an emergency landing. What on earth had she slept through? She undid her seat belt and stood up, peering across the backs of countless stilled heads. None of them were moving. A strange calm took over her as she climbed over Tom and into the aisle. She walked quickly up and down the cabin. All her fellow passengers sat silently and still, but nearly all with their eyes open. They weren't dead, just... stopped somehow. Had the oxygen failed? No, it couldn't have, she would have passed out too. 

She ran up the aisle, past a stewardess sat silently in her seat. This unnerved her even more than the sight of the passengers. She began to stagger and felt her legs growing wobbly. She pulled back the curtain in the first class area and found the aisle blocked by a flight attendant frozen midway through serving something to a passenger. She turned around and hurried up to the exit door behind her, peering out of the porthole desperately searching for any evidence of what was going on. There was nothing to see, just the clear sky, the ocean below and the sun above. As she stood there, uncomprehending, gripped by a cold terror far beyond anything she had known she felt something press into the back of her arm, and an instant cold feeling spreading around her wrist. She darted around at the shock and could see a figure standing infront of her. Her legs sagged and she flopped forward onto the floor. Blearily she could feel the irritating coarseness of the plane's carpet on her face. She had a strange thought; she had flopped forward onto her face but hadn't crushed her glasses into her nose. She realised that she had never put her glasses back on and that they were still in the back of the seat in front of her. She was suddenly very calm and contented, and closed her eyes. 

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Eight: seven months later.

They didn't go straight away. It would eventually be well over half a year before they found their way to the forest in Maine. Jayne had considered contacting Charles Stanley Wilson-Davis and asking him for the money to off to America. But only for about as long as that first drunken evening after they had come back from LA. The next week she had gone back to work and had put the mysterious message on hold. They had tried to do some research but each idea they had explored had drawn a blank - if there were books about the forests of Maine they were not something that were to be found in the Salford library - or had been too vague as to be useful. Jayne had looked at an American website cataloging missing people, and had found several cases in the right state. Perhaps any of them would turn out to be the mystery that she could potentially solve with her elusive message. The thought was tantalizing - when, if, they got to the location that whomever it was had carefully written down for her what would they find? A body? Remains? A long lost secret of some kind? Who could say. It could be anything. She went through the motions of doing her job, listening to new bands, meeting artists and writers, pretending to be excited by what they had to say, but now she could only be excited by what lay across the ocean amongst the blurred pixels of the picture of the forest on her computer screen. When they went, they told friends and family it was for a week trip to Boston, Massachusetts, with, they said, maybe a few day trips into the countryside. It had been hard to keep the secret from everybody except each other. Jayne had hinted to others at the existence of the message in the envelope. She had told a workmate that one of her neighbours letters had ended up in her post box and she'd inadvertently opened it before noticing what it was. This story had allowed her a bit of cathartic release at being able to express some of what she had felt finding the envelope. 

Tom had kept remarkably sanguine about the message; "there's two possibilities" he had said one evening "either we go there and find something, or we don't. I can live with either of the two options. I only start to get worried when something a bit more threatening than a list of coordinates appears in my post box". `Neverless he seemed keen to go on an adventure, even if it meant incorporating a holiday in along with it. "It's not exactly going to take a huge effort to get there is it?" he had reassured her "There's plenty of roads on the map around that spot. Even if we're wasting our time, chasing a prank, an imaginative prank it must be said, by one of our neighbours, it's not like we're crossing Antarctica to find a Norwegian flag already planted there and a message saying 'better luck next time chaps'". 

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Nine: Seven months earlier.

The voice was distant at first, a whisper coming to her from far away. It was very soft and dreamlike and she struggled to hear it even though there was no other noise. 

"Hello?" the voice asked inquiringly.

"Hello?" it repeated

Jayne could not open her eyes. She wanted to yet somehow couldn't will herself to do it. It was the familiar feeling of being half awake in the morning, thinking of climbing out of bed yet being strangely immobilized as if the brain had awoken but the body had not yet done the same. 

"Hello?"

She remembered everything; the still plane full of silent passengers. The absolute quiet without the white roar of the engines. Yet somehow she was calm and unworried, content to lie still and sleep. But she could not sleep, the voice kept speaking and her mind kept listening. 

"You..." it began slowly and deliberately. "Are..." it continued soothingly, like a stage hypnotist, "probably wondering" it paused and then corrected itself "are probably confused and disorientated." 

"Yes". Jayne said, almost involuntarily, as if she was replying to Tom when he was telling her about some exiting news story while she was half asleep.

"Mmmm. I do feel... I'm not sure. Tired. I suppose."

The voice took on a more practiced tone, as if it was a doctor reading the list of side effects for a prescribed drug; " Yes, that is to be expected. It is quite usual for you to feel tired. You are..." the voice paused seemingly thinking of the right way to phrase what it was saying "...sedated, I suppose is the best way for you to understand, even though you are not sedated in any chemically induced way, the effect is the same. Your thoughts are not affected but your emotional responses are being suppressed. It is the easiest way."

She lay still for several more minutes, trying to understand what had been said. It was difficult, she still had a urge to sleep and could not rouse herself enough to speak more than a few words. 

"What?" she began and paused. She summed up the energy to continue her thoughts "What, is all this? What has happened here?"

The voice did not reply to her question, instead it said "maybe the level is too strong, I will reduce it to allow you to function more easily." It took on a sterner tone "However, a as this is something of an unusual and irregular situation you must promise me that you will follow instructions" 

There was a momentary pause and then she suddenly felt a rush of energy and wakefulness. She opened her eyes and sat up.

"Oh my!" she heard herself exclaim, calmly and in an interested tone. She was still sat where she had fell earlier, in the exit aisle of the plane, next to the galley.
A rumpled looking, slightly greying middle aged man, dressed in a tweed jacket, and extremely un-threatening looking, was standing looking down at her. Across the aisle, in the opposite doorway, two men sat on the floor, eyes closed as if asleep, dressed in heavy jackets, wrapped up in scarves and with goggles and leather helmets perched on their. Like the passengers they did not move. The man raised his hand slightly in greeting.

"There has been a slight error. One of our routine processes has experienced a small problem. You have been caught up in this problem" he quickly added "this is not anything you need to concern yourself with, you are, as I said before, perfectly safe and will be returned to you normal life as soon as is possible. These two gentlemen will be returned as well" he looked a little crestfallen "sadly that will mean returning them to fly on to their fate."

"Their fate?" asked Jayne, "what fate?" she added before he could continue "who are they, who are you?"

"They are aviators. They are trying to fly from the city of Paris to the city of New York. They are both brave men, but sadly they are destined not to make it." He waved his hand with a slight flourish over his chest "I, am a... historian" he said with an air of pride "I suppose is the best way to explain. I am interested in the past and I study it".

Jayne's thoughts landed on the question her addled mind had been searching for

"Are you an alien?" she said firmly

He considered the question, frowning thoughtfully. "Well..." he mused "there are two possible answers to that question. Either way the answer has some rather astonishing implications for you." He stopped.

"Yes?" she prompted.

"Well, either I'm an alien which means you are talking to an alien life form, something that, as far as you are aware, no human has ever done before." A hind of a smile tugged slightly round his face and became more animated than she had had seen him before "or I am not an alien which would make me a human. And, well I almost hesitate to explain further, if I am a human then what on earth am I doing here and how come I seem to have access to such astonishing technology" He was smiling now and there was a cheeky twinkle in his eye.

"I don't know what to say" she replied. "I wish I could feel something. This is all so strange whatever you've done here to calm me down." She thought, and added "can't you loosen it up somehow, I feel like I'm chained up here". 

He looked at her seriously "No, I'm sorry allowing you to feel your natural level of stimulation in these situations would be unwise. The physical and mental strains could be very dangerous"

"I haven't got a heart condition you know" she smirked. "I'm quite a calm person really"

"I know, but all this has been considered. In case this happens I had to have a plan in effect, I don't want anyone to come to harm."

"So, what has happened? Is this right?" She looked at him critically "Do you know what you're doing?"

He had been standing quite stiffly but now he seemed to rouse and looked her square in the eye and said firmly

"Yes, I do. I am dealing with very a complicated system and it is very difficult not to have a few unforeseen problems to deal with."

"Deal with?" 

He sighed slightly

"As I said there is no danger to you. You have been..." he thought "ensnared by mistake. I was focused on these two men and their plane and have caught this plane too. I must admit, I do not know quite how you have remained aware of your surroundings, but as I said, I have arrangements to make sure that you have not become overstressed."

"Do you always talk like this?"

"No, but I am dealing with an unfamiliar language. Look, I will get to the point" He stopped, pulled a device from his pocket and tossed it into the air as if he was flipping a coin. The small golden ball stopped in mid-air and transformed into a small hovering projection of the Earth. "I am from your future. I am human." he pointed at the hovering globe "This is the Earth in my time" He reached into the projection, it disappeared and he placed the small golden device back in his pocket. "Projection device." he explained "standard equipment, they are ubiquitous in our time, they provide entertainment, instructions, assistance..." he interrupted himself and pulled the device back out and flipped it back into the air. It hovered and brought up a menu of options which he scrolled through until he found one and pressed it" A person appeared instantly next to him, a thirty-something looking woman smartly dressed, he looked back to Jayne "see? Mobile assistant. If I need to know anything I ask her. So much better than some boring computer screen.

He turned to the figure. "Tell our friend who I am and what I am doing here." He turned to Jayne again and smiled "saves me having to do it"

The woman smiled and looked at Jayne "Certainly" she said "This is Professor Lancelot Meijer of the University of Cambridge. He is a historian. He uses time travel to directly study the past. He is currently investigating the flight of Monsieur Charles Nungesser and Monsieur Francois Coli who tried to fly across the Atlantic Ocean from France to America in the year 1927. They disappeared and were never found. The professor is using this technology to find out what happened to them". 

The man, now named, reached inside the projection and switched it off. The woman vanished.

"Hmmm,  I probably should have thanked her before I switched her off. There, that is what is happening"

"I'm amazed." Jayne said "well, I would like to be amazed. Since I can't feel anything I don't know what to think. Either this is the most ludicrous drug induced hallucination I have ever experienced" she smiled "not that I have experienced such things before mind you, that is a totally unsubstantiated rumour that I am in no position to comment on" She caught her breath "or this is the greatest ever prank played on anyone and I hope I'm going to be well compensated if anybody is filming this." 

"Or this is in fact what is happening"

"Yes"

"And it is"

"Maybe"

"Can you think of a better explanation?"

"I just did"

"You are not lying comatose in a hospital. That is the only explanation I can think of that would fit. It fits, but it's not true"

"You get to the point don't you" she arched her eyebrow at him

"I am a scientist. Getting to the point is the point."

"I thought you were a historian?"

"Same thing." he said with a hint of hauteur "I know that in your time there are historians who would differ with me but I work to a scientific method, I have no time for rumours. And thanks to my machinery I can look for myself anyway"

There was a long pause. 

"Look" she said finally. "I...erm" she couldn't think clearly. She still had half a mind that this was some dream, but it was terribly vivid and, she had to admit to herself it had made sense so far. Nothing that unusual had happened, well, except for all the still passengers still sat behind her, and the lack of noise and movement from the plane. But dreams were more strange than that, they jumped about, she thought. In a dream, nothing connected, she could be one place one moment and then somewhere else the next with no connection. Often some random face from her secondary school would pop up for no reason whatsoever. That hadn't happened yet. And everything felt real, or at least as real as anything else she had felt while awake and alert. This jumpseat she was perched on, the material of her sleeve, the paint on the bulkhead behind her; it all felt real. 

"Ok" she said at last "say I believe you, and this is real"

"It is" he interrupted

She held up a cautioning finger to him "that is easy for you to say Lancelot." She smiled "Lancelot? Is that a popular name in your time?"

"Yes it is" he said simply.

"I must say" she continued, looking ahead of her at nothing in particular "I never used to believe in all this stuff, when people would claim it happened to them. Met one once, it all sounded so silly really.

"This stuff?" 

"Well you know" she looked at him appraisingly "well, maybe you don't. Men in black, close encounters with little grey men with big eyes, x files, missing time. Do you know" she waved her hands in a gesture of mild exasperation "how odd it is that all that turns out to be right? All those dumb stories, I never believed a word. My other half does - he's back there in your stopping ray thingy by the way - but I never had the time for it, I'm a journalist I can see through bullshit at a hundred paces, I can read people, I know when they are desperate for attention and they always did whenever you'd see them on the telly. Look, I have a bit of a profile, so I'd hear from them too" she did an impression "why don't you write about how the government suppressed this or that and how the new world order  is controlling that. No! Why don't you? I'm busy!" she grinned and shook her head "And they're right the daft... losers." She looked at him again with a mischievous look "you should really visit David Icke. He'd love to meet you, futureboy. And if you really are who you say you are then you can enjoy the pleasure of his company and have plenty of ideas to take back to the year 3000 with you." a hint of sarcasm was leaking into her voice "Belief in repile-oids in the 20th and 21st century, could be a very interesting paper"s

"Well, if it makes you feel any better about things then I can tell you that none of that was me. In fact I think you are the person in the past I have had the most interaction with." He gestured towards the two stilled airmen still sat, almost forgotten, across by the opposite exit door. "Usually they are safely unaware. I confess that I am not sure why you have remained so functional"

"Can I ask" Jayne inquired "are you married?"

"Yes"

"Did you woo her by talking like that?"

"No. You make assumptions about gender I notice"

"Oh, so she's a he?"

"No, she's a she."

"Ah. Well don't worry you haven't come that far back in time, we're quite enlightened here you know. All lifestyles and so forth. I notice that you still have marriage in your time then?"

The man who was possibly called Lancelot grimaced slightly "Yes you've got me. Look..." he looked her in the eye "I'm not supposed to tell you anything. It's a rule of sorts. We have prepared for this eventuality."

"What, someone from the past wants to know the future?" she raised her eyebrows "Do I get an exclusive?"

He looked uncomfortable, and drummed his fingers together. 

"Look, come here and have a see" he beckoned her to the exit behind the two airmen. She got up warily, finally walking closer towards him, and looked out of the window. She could see a stout old fashioned biplane outside the window, suspended about 100 metres away in mid air at the same level as them, similarly still and silent, it's propeller stopped mid-turn. 

"L'Oiseau Blanc - the White Bird" he announced. "A fascinating thing I think you'll agree"

She considered the sight "You haven't answered my question" she said.

"Have I not?"

"I know when somebody wants to change the subject Doctor" she spoke with authority "They invite me to come and have a look at something. Happens all the time when I visit with my notebook, my big coat and a quizzical look on my face." she continued to peer out of the window "they think I'll forget what I was talking about. And doubtless this time I will literally forget all of this." She turned round from the window and faced him, she moved her face close in to his "If what you insinuate is true then presumably you have some kind of device for wiping my memory and returning me to normal with no knowledge of this. Better than putting me down I'll give you that, but given that in mind, will it hurt to have a nice chat about the future? I promise I won't tell anyone, and I'm guessing I won't be able to anyway."

He frowned at her and planted his hands in his pocket "very good, you deduce well." He turned around and paced back across the aisle. "As I said, this is an unusual situation"

"Are you being watched? she ventured "there must be. I  others. I understand that you don't want to cause problems. I'm guessing this..." she waved her hand "is all a bit complex"

He laughed "it is a...bit yes. Look..." he turned "as soon as I saw that you were still conscious I made my way straight here, I didn't want you to come to any harm so I tranquilised you. But I was intrigued to talk to somebody from the past, so I woke you up. You are right there are others but at the moment I cannot communicate with them. Whomever is back in the past is on their own - in your time I believe you call it 'radio silence?'

"Yeah, sort of. It's not a common thing to say"

"So that is why I must be practiced and professional. I am wholly in control of all this.  It's all here" he tapped his head "neurological control!" he said with sudden feeling "it's the only way. I decide to return and "zap", I return. All this is indeed reset, you are returned, I am returned with my research to my time and all continues as normal." He held both his index fingers up in front of his face in a gesture of excitement "THAT, is what is so extraordinary about all this. It WORKS! We did it, we made it work and there have been no unexpected consequences. And I hope that there will continue to be none." He smiled and looked about him "do you know how great this will be for our time? We get history to be hands on, we get to see it and feel it! We have learned so much that had been forgotten in time."

Jayne couldn't help but be charmed by his sudden excitement. She smiled slightly, but maintained her demeanour. It may have been artificially induced somehow, this man - Doctor Lancelot - had used his unseen technology to remove the stronger emotional reactions that would undoubtedly have been flooding over her for the past half an hour, the strangest half an hour she had ever known, but listening to him explain his 'mission' she could understand. With that kind of power she would want to be in control too, it made sense, even if it was frustrating to be stood like a spectator unable to feel the connection she knew she would have otherwise felt. The shock and surprise was wearing off now though and she was warming to her subject. If this was a prank it was a heck of good one, she thought, she'd given a good account of herself if a beaming Jeremy Beadle type host suddenly came walking in and told her she'd won a holiday for being such a good sport. Never mind that she was meant to already be on holiday. 

"But how does it affect things in your time and your society? Do people know about this? It must be worth a fortune. I can't believe that everyone is happy to let a bunch of - with all due respect - history professors - play with time machines"

"No I doubt they would be if they knew the whole truth." he said cryptically

"Go on? I'm intrigued"

"Look, the general concept is common knowledge. The public in my time know it is possible, theoretically. We say to them that we can send small probes back into the past. We suggest to them that it is much more dangerous and difficult than we have developed it to be. The energy requirements are not a problem. By your time's standards they would be unthinkable, just unthinkable" he shook his head in wonder "but they do not know that people can go back ".

"Wouldn't they like to? Wouldn't they like to meet their ancestors" Jayne laughed "wouldn't they like to meet me? I'm probably related to most of them aren't I? Just like William the Conquerer is to me?

"We feel we have managed the situation well. Maybe in the future when our shielding technology is better when we can be sure that we are not interfering. But you see our simulation technology is such that we have been able to build the past for people. There's no need to jump in a time machine, just switch on the simulation. This is part of what I do" he was clearly warming to his subject, Jayne thought, his caution and clipped tone dropping away "I have visited many times, gathered the information and taken it back with me so we can build the past in our time. This..." he waved towards the window, and the two airmen, still sat patiently on the floor, as if they were cargo waiting for transfer, "I admit that this is a more personal interest. I do like these ancient flying machines. This one is fascinating even though I hadn't intended to see it. I was really aiming for the one that mysteriously vanished you see, solve the ancient mystery."

"Are you worried that you have created a monster?"

"Created a monster? I must remember that one. I do love your ancient idioms. See this is like talking to Shakespeare must be for you. I am struggling sometimes with your words. It is why I may sound a little strange. Sorry" he stopped "I am running on a bit".

"That's ok, she leant on the wall and folded her arms. "what about the biggie then? The beginning of the universe? That must have been number one on your list when you fired up your time machine?"

He grinned "yes it was but you must remember we are still but humans, we need a survivable environment. This is a safe time, your atmosphere is breathable, there are no unexpected surprises. You will appreciate that the mathematics of this have been... complicated. Better to stick to the safer options for now. But we do plan that for the future be in no doubt about that."

There was another pause, they both stood and looked at each other. Jayne broke the silence.

"So what now? It is time to get on with what you were doing?"

"Yes, that would probably be wise. I was scanning that plane, preparing to monitor it's course. Find out where it went, solve the mystery."

"What about them?" Jayne pointed towards the two airmen. "We are sending them off to their fate?"

He considered them. "They are brave men." He said simply. "They chose to do this."

Jayne looked at him, warily

"The past does not change I suppose?"

"No. First rule. No changes. We have the means to prevent interference as you can see from your fellow passengers. But we don't change."

"And you put things back the way they were" she  said with resignation. She leant back to the bulkhead and stared up to the ceiling. He walked over to her.

"I am afraid so"

"Could I have a moment of real feeling. Take off whatever it is you've done, your 'emotion field' Let me experience this properly for a moment?"

"It would be irregular, not something we should chance."

"What difference would it make?" Jayne asked "I won't remember this, correct?"

"Correct" He looked her squarely in the eye. She shuddered with a realisation and looked down at the floor.

"But... you will" she whispered. 

"Yes"

The moment passed, she tried to think of something to say that might change his mind but al l thought was suddenly escaping her, as if a plug had been pulled and all thoughts were draining away. 

"Well, it was nice to meet you Professor." a thought suddenly struck her "you know I haven't introduced myself I'm..."

"No!" he cut across. "No name. It is not something I should hear." he spoke quickly and nervously, as if trying not to admit any unwanted thoughts "Professional detachment you know. Best not know too much".

"Oh, I see" she smiled wanly.

"This is not easy, young lady." he suddenly sounded very alien to her, but what he said next immediately made her feel huge empathy and she felt as if she finally understood him.

"You see I could, if I wanted, found out what happens to you. You are long dead in my time. I could look you up. Meet your descendants. I do not want that, it is better to not know."

Jayne considered this, she was moved by his predicament, and a little humbled. Clearly he was used to dealing with some pretty massive moral dilemmas and had very sensibly adopted some basic rules to stick to. Still, she could resist a little appeal;

"But if you do know then I will be remembered long in the future. I must admit, and I hope this doesn't sound shallow, that would be pretty cool" she smiled warmly "even if I don't know it".

He folded his arms and considered her offer. "Cool... that's another good one. A language professor friend told me about that one. "Cool... groovy... square?" he ventured. "Am I correct?"

"Almost" 

He sat down on the little jumpseat in the aisle and pulled the golden device out his pocket again. He held it in his hand and held it up to his left eye. "Maybe..." he mused "we can randomise?" He threw the little ball in the air and caught in his other hand. "Leave it up to chance."

Jayne had an idea and dug in her trouser pocket. "Wait here." she told him and set off down the centre aisle to her seat.

"what?" he called back

"Just a minute let me look in my bag" she shouted back. She walked back past the silent passengers, spotted Tom, book still in front of his face

"'Scuse me, love" she imitated his accent as she leant over him and reached her bag. She rustled around inside, pulled out what she was looking for and walked back to the doorway.

"Heads or tails?" she asked the Professor holding out a fifty pence peace.

The queen's head sat looking face up from the navy carpet of the doorway next to the Professor's foot. 

"Fair enough" he said and looked up at her imploring her to continue. 

"Well", she began with a hint of satisfaction "my name is Jane Louise Farthing, I was born on the 22nd of May 1980, in Peterborough, Great Britain, Europe, the World" She looked at him. "Think that thing will be able to find me?"

He tossed the golden device into air and it flickered to life. A large square menu came up by his face and he began tapping the air searching for something.

"So... futureboy. When do I make it until? When do I die?"

He looked round the large rectangle suspended in the air.

"Wait a moment". He kept fiddling with the screen for several minutes. She leant in the door, waiting.

"Right. Are you sure about this?" he asked.

"Yes. Nothing to lose. As long as you promise I won't remember".

"You won't. I promise".

"Show me."

He pressed the screen. Instantly the rectangle disappeared, to be replaced by three people standing in front of her. A young woman, a young man, and another young woman, all in their mid-twenties. The first young woman was about five foot five and had long dark hair. The man was six foot tall and also had long shoulder length lighter brown hair, he looked vaguely like he could be in a band. The second woman was slender and nearly as tall as the man, she had shorter hair and was clearly of mixed Caucasian and Asian race. 

"Your daughter, grandson and granddaughter all aged twenty five" said the Professor simply.

"She is called Josie, he is Marcus, and she is Eleanor". he gestured to each "you will live to see all of them" he added. 

Jayne looked on fascinated, each figure was still and did not move but they looked as real as if they were stood in front of her. Suddenly she felt a huge rush of emotion and adrenaline.

"And I have switched off the emotional inhibitor" he said but she wasn't listening.

"Oh... my... gosh!" she laughed a stared at them. She walked around the figures and gazed for several minutes. Tears welled up in her eyes as she looked at the person who was apparently her daughter as a grown woman. It was undeniable, she was the same height and looked like a combination of her and Tom's features. "This is... " she tailed off. she waved her hand through the projection "if only... they were real" Then she laughed again "look at me, wishing for more. This is remarkable". The man looked a bit like Tom she thought, he would approve of his rock'n'roll look. The second woman was stunningly pretty, whomever the man had married must be a looker. More minutes passed and gradually Jayne became more and more drowsy. She slumped down on the floor next to the two airmen, and closed her eyes. They were still damp. She heard a voice in the distance.

"It has been a pleasure to meet you Miss Farthing. You know I think I would have done that for you even if you had called tails. Goodbye now, I must get back to work".

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Ten: An unknown time

Professor Meijer carried Jayne back to her seat and placed her carefully back as she had been. He made sure to lean her head against the window and fasten up her seat belt. He walked the length of the plane once more, making sure nothing had been left behind. Obviously the de-contamination process in the machine made sure nothing entered the past that should not be here but he liked to check anyway just to put his mind at rest. Any of the objects he carried back with him were deliberately designed to be completely non-functioning without their connection to their host, and were all programmed to biodegrade into dust rapidly after the end of the mission's assigned time. 

He glanced at Jayne's still form as he walked back past her. He had liked her in their brief little encounter. Even with the emotional inhibitor acting on her she had been remarkably calm person and pleasingly willing to believe his story. Admittedly he had not engaged many people from the past in conversation. Usually the machine made sure they were safely kept in the envelope of slowed down time, but occasionally one or two had been left out. Once or twice this had caused a few problems - he recalled the time when one poor sailor aboard Henry the Eighths's Mary Rose had been left wandering the suddenly silent and stilled ship. He hadn't found the man for several minutes and had to engage the tranquilizer quickly before the man, who was a not inconsiderable size, swung a large broadsword into his head. That had been a harrowing mission all round, studying the great wooden ship filled with the countless doomed sailors, all of whom were to be shortly heading for a watery grave. He had dreaded the moment when his survey would be done and he would have to leave and send them on their way. 

Non-interference was doubtless a worthy goal, he thought, but it was hard to stay so passive, especially around so much disaster and tragedy. They had solved so many mysteries, and studied throughout so much of human history, it seemed such a shame that they could not affect the lives of those they were studying. It had been debated, naturally. The University and their fellow time-historians around the world had spent decades mulling over the issue. Central and above all was this question; could they change the past? Or did it all fit together in a loop? Were they going back and altering something, or simply doing what had already been done long ago. Personally he favoured the latter theory. He had been on the side that had argued, sometimes with great fervour and feeling, that the fact that they were doing what they were doing at all proved it correct. All time was one, and they were hopping around the multiverse to their hearts content. How he'd longed to go and have a chat with Isaac Newton or Einstein about the subject. Wouldn't they like to know how it all worked? He could dream of course.

Then there was this girl - this random person he had talked to and shared the most extraordinary human achievement with - and he had had to take it away as he had with all the others. The projection of her descendants had been a moment of impulsiveness. He had been so impressed with her perceptiveness at knowing that he would be able to tell her how and when she would eventually die that he had been unable to resist reassuring her - albeit for only a few minutes - that it would not be for many more years yet. It was a neat trick, and it had given him a great amount of pleasure just to see her expression of wonder. How sad that he then had to send her, unknowing, back to her life. It was for the best of course; how, after all, was she supposed to live knowing all that she did? Such a profound shock would effectively destroy the person she had once been. He could not live with the thought that he had done that.

There was a mission to perform, and he would continue on. But the thought nagged at him; perhaps he could leave her with... what? Something. Somehow. A little hint to what had been. This poor woman would live the rest of her days not knowing that she had met, spoken to, a man from the far, far future. Just an echo, the tiniest hint of their meeting, the meeting of two worlds. A present. It was not generally permitted of course. Not at all. Again it was something that had been hotly debated by scientists, writers, philosophers and all the rest. Go back and change the past for the better. Improve the human race, even just by nudging the primitives of the past in the right direction. Some argued that perhaps this had already happened; that the great leaps forward were the result of some great leaps backwards in time. 

It made Professor Meijer weary; he was happy to stay in the non-interference camp. To make the present better. However he always nursed his pet project; a calling card. Nothing too elaborate. Just an item from the past marked with some evidence of his passing. It would be of no significance whatsoever. He didn't believe in fate, but the glitch that had led to a meeting with the girl had made his mind up. He looked at her again, and thought of the data he had looked up on her. "Let's give you a little memento, Miss Farthing" he thought. "From my time to yours". He looked out of the window one last time. The white bird was becoming an ever smaller speck below him. It dissolved away to nothing. He picked the golden ball from his pocket and suspended it infront of himself. He closed his eyes. A moment later he opened them and the interior of the ancient flying machine was replaced by the familiar blackness of the antechamber. He would have to wait for several hours to be given the all clear. Then he would be free to get back to work.

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Eleven: Present day.

The road led through an overgrown hollow, filled with clogging weeds and fallen tree trunks, and led up a steep hill, skirting along a ridge with a steep drop to their left side. At times the mud looked as if it might be too thick and they considered stopping and continuing on foot. However it was still several miles further up the road to the nearest point at which they would have to continue on foot anyway, deep into the forest for a further couple of miles till they reached the spot. The sun shone above the leaves of the tress but it could not reach down to the ground and dry out the mud. They elected to carry on and soon the road surface became better as they turned away from the ridge and into the forest. They passed signs of logging - piles of tree trunks stacked by the road, and at one point a large cutting machine sat idle in a layby cut into the trees. This gave them cause for optimism that the road would stay passable. The trees closed in around them and grew close to the road side as they pressed on. A few minutes later they spied another layby and pulled in.

"This is probably the closest place we can stop" Jayne said examining the map on her phone. 

"It's a few miles away off to the right" she waved into the trees.

Tom turned off the engine and climbed out. 

"You have your keys?" he asked

Jayne fished the other set of hire-car keys out her pocket and waved them at him. 

"Just checking"

They were both city kids born and bred, being out deep in the forest was not within their comfort zone. As a result they had made sure they were ready for anything and had stuffed their backpacks full of every conceivable item they might need.

"Jesus this is bloody heavy" Jayne groaned as she hauled her bag onto her back. They trudged up the road for half a mile looking for a convenient path into the trees but there was no evidence of any disturbance in the wall of foliage.

"Looks like this is closest we can get" said Tom matter-of-factly. "Now we dive in". He strode off purposefully into the undergrowth. Jayne looked around at the road, sighed, and followed him in. It was surprisingly easy going. once they had struggled through some of the undergrowth near the road side the ground became barer and easier to cross. The mud was still thick in places, and their were clouds of midges hovering around in places. They came to small valley in the trees, stumbled and slid down the slope, taking care to note whether they could come back up it again. They crossed the stream at the bottom and clambered up the other side. Jayne looked again at the map on her phone. The numbers in the coordinates box were matching the numbers left to them by their mysterious source.

"It should be just up here" she motioned to  the top of the slope. Her excitement was mounting now, what was it they were about to find? Would they find anything? Or, more worryingly, was there something to find that they were about to miss? 

They couldn't miss it. At the top of the slope was a slight clearing. Several younger looking trees sprouted in the middle of the clearing with the brooding darker shapes of the ancient forest standing behind them. The ground here was slightly drier as the sun could reach it and dry away the mud. Tangled ferns covered the ground, and there were more clouds of insects, picked out by the rays of sunlight. A rustling in the undergrowth made them both jump with apprehension - but it was only a chipmunk; it scurried up to a branch and eyed them curiously. Behind the clump of trees and bushes was a large metal object, at least two metres long and a metre tall, sat partly sunken into the ground. It was too covered by the undergrowth for them the make out precisely what it was. They both looked at each other, wide eyed with excitement.

"That?" mouthed Jayne and looked back to the object. She wasn't quite sure why she was whispering, there was nobody else around to hear them. But the air was completely still and the quiet was absolute - it seemed inappropriate to speak in anything other than a hushed whisper. 

Tom nodded back to her. "I guess so" he shrugged his shoulders. "Wanna take a look?"

"Do you think we should? Is it dangerous? Maybe it's an old bomb or something" Jayne suddenly felt a shudder of excitement and fear as a thought struck her. Hadn't the US Air Force once lost an atomic bomb once? Back in the sixties or fifties? 

"What if it's a... y'know..." she hesitated. It did sound a bit ridiculous to say it, and she guessed that Tom might shoot her thought down instantly with one of his withering eye-rolls "... nuke?" 

"Hmmmm" he considered. "Well I would say that stranger things have happened but the fact that we're standing here at all is, I would argue, pretty damn weird. But at the same time I'd reckon if the US government had lost a nuclear bomb I doubt it would be sitting here fifty odd years later. And I suppose if they wanted to secretly tip someone off about it I doubt it would be us. As much as I would be flattered by the idea that they think that highly of us" he laughed. Jayne nodded in agreement and felt her momentary panicked though sink away. Good old Tom, he's always good for a bit of calming rationalisation. She'd been ready to reach for a Geiger counter.

"Still, it could be a bomb?"

"well then, tread carefully"

Tom stepped carefully round the trees, pushing aside the ferns and scanning the ground. Jayne held back and waited. She smelt the air and was reassured by the lack of any strange odours. If this had been some dumping ground for a body, she reasoned, there would probably be some bad smell. There wasn't, whatever it was, she hoped, it was not a crime scene. Still, she waited intently. 

Tom had reached the object and was looking at it intently. A moment later he shouted back to her

"It's an engine"

"Yes?" she replied, trying to prompt him to say more. He took the hint.

"Big one. An aeroplane. It's old."

"Old?" she prompted again.

"Come round and have a look"

"Sure it's safe?"

"Can't see anything dangerous. This has been here a very long time". 

She picked her way through the ferns and reached where Tom was standing. The object was unquestionably what he had said it was; an old engine. It stained almost black from all the years it had sat here and was corroding away across it's whole structure. It was still the right way up; the two banks of exhaust pipes sat on either side, and there was the remains of a broken propeller on the front end. The blades were all snapped away - whatever had happened to the plane the engine had once powered, it had obviously not been a smooth or controlled. 

"Well well well". Tom said looking at the large slab of iron. "Solve one mystery, find another one"

"Any idea what kind of plane?" Jayne asked him hopefully.

"Nope." he said simply, then added for elaboration "planes and engines are a bit interchangeable really. Even if I did know, which I admit I don't, it might not narrow it down much."

"And we still don't know why somebody wanted us to find it. Why send us, and not just claim it for yourself. God knows what they were doing out here anyway."

"Well those logging trucks show that somebody's out here fairly regularly" Tom said, and then added "perhaps you've got a fan?"

"Yeah, American logging crews read Mancunian hipster magazines" she replied with a dash of sarcasm.

"Don't see why not. I read all kinds of stuff on the internet."

"I know you do. I prefer not to think about what you're up to when I'm out"

He grinned; "Toosh - and indeed - ay" he said in an exaggerated Essex twang. He was still looking at the broken propeller. "Question is, where's the rest of it?" He started scouting around the undergrowth. 

"Surely the question is 'where's the pilot?" she added, following him.

"Judging by the age of that" he waved at the engine "he's long gone. Lot of animals out here" 

Jayne shuddered and hugged herself slightly. True enough, she thought. 

"Poor guy" 

"Might've been, y'know, gone instantly. That propeller's pretty broken up." he was looking intently at the ground around the surrounding trees. "Worse ways to go I suppose. One moment here, next, gone."

"I wonder what happened to him?"

"Dunno. Fuel, maybe. I know it's old but there's not much sign of any fire." he said "anyway, who says it was a 'him', never know lot's of women flyers back then".

"Ah well, I can't see a girl wanting to fly over a featureless forest, that's a very blokey thing to be doing"

"Well I wouldn't want to send you back in time to meet Amelia Earhart and tell her that" 

"Was she the one who went missing?" Jayne asked

"Yep, but not here before you ask. In the Pacific Ocean."

Jayne thought for a moment

"You know how we reversed those coordinates and got somewhere out in the Pacific ocean? If we get a boat next year with a diver and it turns out that she's there I really am going to start wondering if there isn't something going on that we don't know about."

"I think it was more the Hawaii, Fiji sort of area" 

There was a fallen log on the ground and they stopped to sit on it. Jayne unpacked her camera from it's bag and snapped some pictures.

"For our eyes only." she sighed "for now"

They sat quietly for a few more minutes before Tom declared that he was going look in the trees where they had originally walked into the clearing.

"Don't go out of sight" Jayne called after him

"Hey, I've seen the movies!" he called back "I'm not going anywhere. Jayne stood up to take some closer pictures of the remains of the engine. As she was doing this she heard Tom call to her

"Jayney dearest come and have a look at this!"

She walked quickly across to where he was standing, amongst the older trees. As she got nearer to the trees she noticed that they weren't quite as old as she originally thought. Tom waved to the object he was looking at on the ground.

"Definitely a piece of it" he said.

It was a large sheet of torn fabric, covered in dirt, and cracked on the surface as if some kind of surface treatment had been applied to it. The fabric was coloured blue, white and red, as if it was painted in the colours of the French tricolour flag, although the colours had faded away somewhat, and the white was yellowing. As they swept away the covering of dirt they could make out stencilled letters written on the fabric

P. LEVASSEUR 

TYPE  8

Underneath the lettering was a large silhouette on a ship's anchor, printed on the white section of the fabric. 

"Wow, let's get some pictures of this" said Tom, breathlessly. 

"Do you recognise it?" asked Jayne hopefully

"I don't know. I can tell you what it could be. That looks like a French flag doesn't it?" he asked her.

"Combined with that 'Levasseur' name I'd say it is yes" she replied.

"Well, there is a well known story of a missing French plane from many years ago. I don't know if this is it though."

"Tell me" she asked. 

"Well you know Charles Lindbergh right?" he asked her "first man to fly solo across the Atlantic?"

"Yes."

"Well, he wasn't the only one trying in those days. It's just that he was the one who made it, loads of people tried but didn't. One of those was these French guys right? I can't remember their names, but they had a white plane you see." he waved excitedly at the fabric laying on the ground like a picnic cloth, "big white plane, and they were trying to get to New York from Paris, so they were going the other way, and they vanished! Nobody knows what happened to them! So.... maybe this is them!"

"Oh... my"

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Twelve

One moment he was not there, the next he was. There was no flash of light or sound. He simply appeared, standing on the stairwell. He held the envelope in his gloved hand and considered it. He took the paper out with the coordinates of Nungessor and Coli's final resting place and read it again. 

4176576677666N

7157575757757W

Look into it.

Either it was the most important, and perhaps risky piece of paper ever to exist in the history of the universe. Or, it would be a nice little adventure for her to go on. An intriguing mystery for the young woman he had accidentally ensnared in his mission. He would find out in due course. He walked up to the postboxes and opened the flap to Number 103. He paused. Was this the right thing to do? He posted the envelope. Perhaps Jayne Farthing deserved to be let in on the loop after all.