I read this story every Christmas Eve. That, and The Spirit of Steamboat.
I've set the time for the takeoff time of the Vampire.[1]
If you are flying tonight, I hope that the scope monkeys were watching out for you.
I wish you and yours a Happy Christmas. Please do your part to say safe and around for your friends and family.
__________________________
[1] Warbird nerds are aware that the DeHavilland Vampire was long obsolete as a fighter by 1957. It had been replaced by its swept-wing sibling, the Venom and by 1957, the Hawker Hunter.
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A classic tale, spoilt only for some by the non-existence of RAF Minton. It’s a minor thing, but having grown up in Lowestoft, which the pilot would have overflow to get to the imaginary base, it’s a little annoying he couldn’t have selected one of the old bomber bases that were scattered all over East Anglia.
As a paid off Scope Monkey, who spent nearly 20 consecutive years working the Christmas Eve/Christmas Day midnight shift, it was always an enjoyable shift with various imaginary Santa flight plans pinballing around the system.
The narrator of the piece is Alan Maitland. He was the co-host of the CBC radio show "As It Happens" with Barbara Frum .
There are a series of these that he did for the show under the nickname Fireside Al. The "Gift of the Magi" etc .
CP88
The CBC played this the other night and afterwards an interview with the author. He wrote this on a challenge from his wife to 'Write a ghost story" for her . He knocked it off in a couple of hours and gave it to her. She showed it to family and everyone liked it so she called his agent. The agent came to Dublin from London,saw the potential and in a couple days it was on the BBC and went "viral" .
He was a Pathfinder in the war so why he picked a non existent base probably has to do with the fact he was writing from memory with no intention of publishing.
The one thing that I think was intentional was making the Pathfinder pilot Irish for his Irish wife.
Merry Christmas,
Thanks. It's Just Not Christmas without the Shepherd.
Spirit of Steamboat is available from archive.org, either to read there online or download as a PDF; both are free. For those of us eking out a budget in our 'golden' years, archive.org is a wonderful resource. While new books are rarely available there, the shelf of older stuff, plus rare and out of print books, is deep.
https://archive.org/details/inlibrary?query=steamboat+longmire
From Spirit of Steamboat"...the lounge is in an assisted living retirement home....
“Lucian shot the television in the lounge.”
I raised my eyes and, suddenly tired, looked at her.
“Again?”
“Again.”
I glanced at the young woman at my side, who was politely
ignoring the conversation.
“Fox News; that’s the second one in a year and now
there’s no holiday entertainment for the masses.”
...a man of principles,taste and conviction
Merry Christmas to you and yours!
A family tradition here. My late teen, early twenties granddaughter's and boyfriend's enjoyed it. they even put down their phones.
Re: archive.org online library. Its book have DRM (Digital Rights Mgmt...lockdown), but:
You can:
1) read it online while in the archive.org website OR
2) download it and:
2a) read it in Adobe Digital Editions (for as long as you have the book "checked out") OR
2b) get yourself the Calibre ebook application...with library and reader functionality that offers add-ons to strip out DRM. With Calibre and the right add-ons:
2bi) you download the book using ADE
2bii) drag it into Calibre library...and that's it. DRM is gone and you have the EPUB of PDF forever. I have some 500 books thus. Once you set it up, everything just works and continues to.
I don't try to skirt things for living authors. They deserve to eat.
But their descendants did nothing but win the Lucky Sperm Lottery. If I can find a copy elsewhere of a dead author's work, I'll go for it.
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