Back to work, but not a lot. AAP have given me a book to edit together in their series of Australian War Stories. I have to write the war history of a particular Flying Officer who served in the Middle East flying as a Wireless Operator/Air Gunner in a Baltimore bomber.
I have it as a rough collection of historical material sourced from the previous AAP background work – such as squadron histories and outlines of various battles and wars. More detailed material has been supplied by the man’s family and I’ve been adding to it all by reading through the squadron history in its official Operations Book.
Luckily for this project, the National Archives of Australia have digitised many of these records. However, they are just .pdf facsimiles, sometimes the quality of the original typewritten pages is poor and you can’t search them – so you have to trawl through looking for the right names.
It should take about two days to rewrite the material into one cohesive 10,000 word book, but this is my first one and it will take me a lot longer than that! Still, it is interesting work. It has taken a big mental effort to get my head around it all, but I’m enjoying it a lot now I’m back in the swing of it.
Also back in the swing is my golf. I had a game with Norm Arnott, who is fresh back from climbing Mt Kilimanjaro (although fresh is probably the wrong word, he looked a bit knackered after scaling the almost 20,000 ft high peak.) We had a good game at Massey Park, the usual brilliant shots followed by crap shots. Norm got a couple of pars and lots of bogies. I got no pars at all, being cruelly robbed at several holes by the fickle finger of fate. Still it was fun.
Also back in the swing is my gliding and tug-flying. I’ve had a couple of fun tugging sessions. Yesterday I went to glide and managed a very pleasant flight in the Astir of just under 2 1/2 hours. Cloud base was about 4500 feet and the thermals were very broken up, so it was a challenging flight. I also managed a couple of loops and chandelles just to spice things up a bit.
