Saturday 1 Sept

Well, I wasn't on duty today, and so it didn't rain. Note that wasn't me who set up the rota that put E team on Bank Holiday Monday, a combination pretty well guaranteed to ruin the weather! Today I was there in my capacity as P2 doing instructor renewals flying with the Boss whose day it was. As indeed was Professor Dann. We duly started the day with cable breaks on the grounds that it didn't matter that the low cloud hadn't yet burnt off; this had the excellent effect of making a weak sun come out. There then ensued a cat-and-mouse game between CFI and instructor-under-renewal to see who could catch the other out. The CFI will ALWAYS win this game for a number of reasons. Firstly, he is the boss, very close to God/gods and always right. Secondly, he can always claim that any error you pick up was Bloggs and well done for spotting it (no, really, it was...). Thirdly, he can pull the bung on you just before you were going to pull the bung on him. Fourthly, he is the boss, see point 1. If this were not the case, then how would he manage to put a 'sucker's thermal' just where we were about to enter the circuit - which was drifting us away from the site at around the same rate as we were climbing. And coming and going to try to tempt you to centre downwind just a little further... We did in the end manage to soar away high enough to complete the briefed exercises but it was a marathon scrape! So both I and Richard were duly renewed and can continue to terrorise the rest of you; but the real achievement of the day goes to Jon who passed his Bronze paper with flying colours. Well done Jon!