Following in the flightpath of John Aubrey

This book which arrived yesterday is one of two biographies of John Aubrey which I have ordered recently. I will be Aubreyed-out soon.

The portrait of him used as the book cover has been lost and only this image remains as a photo in Manchester University. I would like to find the original one day, sitting in the back of some old junk shop. It is a little disturbing when you see what he is using as a hand-rest, and I am hoping that his placing of the hand on the black boy's head is a gesture of patronly protection, and not a symbol of the subjugation of an entire continent. It is an appallingly bad painting, so I am just guessing that the artist used an imaginary figure as a prop. I don't think that Aubrey could ever have afforded a servant at any point in his life, but I will find out when I read the book.

There are a series of coincidences which seem to somehow link me - or at least draw me toward - the life of John Aubrey. He was born in a village very close to here, a little North of Chippenham. He ended up in Oxford.

His friends and relatives were scattered around Wiltshire, one of whom lived in Bolhyde Manor, Allington. The author of this book lived on the Bolhyde estate too, but in one of the farms.

I once had a brief affair with a girl whose landlord and friends were Viscount and Viscountess Garmoyle of Bolhyde Manor. I had dinner there once, and as I left was invited back for another dinner about three weeks hence.

I am not very good at remembering any arrangements further in advance of a couple of days, and having no secretary or P.A. I completely forgot about the dinner-date.

Being an despicable and cowardly cad, I did not phone my hostess to apologise, but simply tried to drive it from my mind by ignoring her for the next couple of months.

Then, one lovely Summer's evening I found myself in a huge hot-air balloon, drifting over Wiltshire. I was working for the ballooning company at the time, and this trip was a reward for all the retrievals I had done for them.

We were running out of gas and urgently needed a place to land. I began to feel a little apprehensive when Bolhyde Manor came into view, surrounded by acres of green fields and with a huge paddock right beside the house.

The pilot began to eye the place up, but I said that I knew it and the owners were hardly likely to want us to land there because they had horses.

Just after I had said that, The Viscount and his wife, plus my erstwhile dinner-date came out on the terrace and looked up at us as we approached at about 200 feet. They began waving and yelling, pointing to the paddock and encouraging the pilot to drop his balloon into it, which he did. We had never had such a welcome from a landowner before.

After we touched down, I got out of the basket, walked up to the girl and delivered one of the best lines ever in my career as a despicable cad:

"Sorry I'm late."

Aubrey's death mask and better known portrait: