Tom Womack

Last weekend, hsenag and aendr warmed their house in St Neot's. This is twenty miles from Cambridge, there are pleasant routes both north and south of the A428, they have a shower, so I cycled there and back.

	Food was barbecued; if you run out of charcoal, don't buy one-use barbecues and pour the charcoal out of them, because it's soaked in something singularly smoky for ease of ignition
Babies were admired and cuddled (thanks to the forebearance of the other people at the party, there is no picture of me cuddling baby Daniel, though there were a few awws)
	A Lego model powered by the descent of a large weight was built

Geomag was assembled, and we all went to sleep at about 2:15. The next morning there came a gargantuan breakfast, and at about 2:30, being a pleasantly after-breakfast sort of an hour, I started cycling back.

The road at Papworth has been rerouted since Google Maps mapped it, so I got rather lost and ended up cycling through the undulating village twice before heading off to Elmsworth across a field. As I reached the brow of a hill, a strange sight caught my eye; it was the first Sunday in the month, and the East Anglia Rocketry Society was having its monthly launch day.

Up they go ...	And down they come ...	Some faster than others

These are quite high-powered rockets and about six feet long. Leaving the pad with a splendid whoosh of engine and crackle of tormented air, they get up to about 2500 feet in a few seconds, before deploying a parachute and drifting half a mile down-wind. Fortunately the launch is from the middle of a 1600-acre arable farm, and at this time of year pink parachutes are quite visible against the stubble.