Charlie, meanwhile, had a strange look on his face, at once bemused and yet transfixed. Perhaps he was wondering if adults always get up to this kind of thing in the hours after bedtime?


Upstairs, our other boy Theo was now wide awake – his initial thought on the noise, he said, was that dinosaurs were stomping on the house – as the inhabitants of Middle Street gathered to see why their television sets had gone black.


The pilot and passenger, thank goodness, were unhurt – pride bruised, no doubt, and fortunate to have escaped. A “cable strike” is the ballooning terminology, according to the pilot. If such incidents have their own name they must happen disturbingly often. Apparently the angle of the sunset made the cables invisible.


Power was restored within 90 minutes – thanks, Western Power Distribution – but the workmen carried on under lights through the night.


The Eastington Balloon Crash of 2015 will live long in the memory. And no doubt dwell permanently in the subconscious of those too young to understand what on earth was going on…


Rupert Janisch

One wonders about the origins of our adult phobias.

For my three-year-old son Charlie, never mind the rest of us, the events of Wednesday 13th of May have surely burst the aura of aesthetic wonder of hot air balloon flying for ever.

“Hello”, he called to the pilot as she skimmed the roof of Elmhay Cottages. “Hi”, came the surprisingly curt and wave-lacking response to us as we stood in our back garden.

“Not very friendly,” I mused.


Out to the front to watch the remainder of the journey as, we expected, the balloon would rise majestically over Middle Street.

But no…

It soon transpired that the pilot was attempting to land the balloon in the field just opposite our house.


“Fair enough, just concentrating,” thought I.


Crash, bang, wallop, what a picture!

Then, BOOM! CRACK! A whiplash of power cable, a flash of 11,000 volts and some perturbed clucks from the nearby chicken coop, as the noiseless inflatable became noisily deflated.


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