Sitting in Concorde waiting on the tarmac for the
magical moment of take off seemed to be an age. I had arrived on my own as this
was a special present to me. I had checked that my video camcorder was ready
with a fully charged battery and that I had the correct film in the camera. I
had checked my bits and pieces several times and that the other batteries and
films were all stored in my bag. This was December 1997 and I had never
imagined I would be in this seat on a plane that was in its third decade of
service. To look at Concorde it is difficult to imagine that it has been in
service for so many years. It looked like it had just been built. Nothing must
go wrong. This was to be a circular flight taking off from London's Heathrow
Airport eventually going supersonic beyond the Scilly Isles west of Cornwall
and around the Bay of Biscay. A non-landing supersonic flight. It turned out
that the man sitting next to me had also been given a similar birthday gift to
me. He had travelled from Suffolk and I had come up from Kent. We chatted about
Concorde. It was easy to talk about something that was so common between us. We
introduced ourselves.
"I am Mark," I
offered and my fellow passenger told me that his name was Spencer.
After a moment in dawned on us
both at the same moment the name combination: Mark and Spencer. Perhaps
somebody had a real sense of humour when they allocated the seats all those
weeks ago when they were independently booked, but it was an hilarious moment.
It seemed that Concorde roared
with us too.
In July 2004 at Las Vegas,
Nevada, I was sitting in the huge reception area of the Stardust Hotel enjoying
a morning coffee when a fellow passenger sat down. We had been travelling on
the same coach for over a week and this was the first chance we had to speak to
each other. The holiday was a coach tour around California, Arizona and Nevada.
A lot of travelling and a very informative Tour Manager meant there was a lot
to take in and with lunchtime stops, overnight hotel stops, meals and resting
there was little time for socialising. Sitting in Las Vegas many thousands of
miles from the United Kingdom was a long way from home and Bernie and I talked
about where we had come from. It quickly became obvious that he knew the area
from which I had come. The conversation moved on to earlier years and Bernie
had lived not many miles from me before he had moved to Suffolk. My mind
flashed to Concorde and Spencer.
Bernie was a few years older
than I and he knew the small town of Sandwich, about 15 miles from where I
live. When he was a young schoolboy he had gone to school in Sandwich. So had
I. And then we discovered that we had gone to the same school. Amazing. Here we
were thousands of miles from home and travelling on the very same coach around
western America and we had gone to the very same school in England maybe 40
years before. We knew all the same teachers, the same haunts and the little
things that only Old Manwoodians could know.
We shared a great deal of
history between us and, although we were not at the school at quite the same
time, only a few years separated us.
© Louis Brothnias (2005)