Onwards and upwards....

I can't believe how long it is since I last posted.  We've been up and back from London a couple of times, organising things for a friend + family to stay at our flat, and then going down to London to spend some time with them.

As regards the aeroplane I've mainly been working on the doors.  They may not look like much but there's a lot of trimming to fit the door frames (as done by Julian to my wavery blue line), attachment of door hinges, retrimming, adding in the rain gutters, trimming again, then putting in the door seals.  Funny thing is that a seal isn't the really useful bits of rubber that seal, but a less useful more hard piece of rubber onto which the useful bits are stuck.

Julian's been busy working on the wings - cutting holes (tricky as the distance from the outside of the wing and the embedded fuel tank is 5mm, so you want to go easy with those power tools!), putting tubes through and sticking the upwards curving wing tips on etc.  (I shan't get too technical here as frankly it didn't mean much to me until recently!)

Today was a bit of an easy day in a way, a lot of driving around to pick up parts (and drop a few off) and some aimless meandering as we tried to find the really good local butcher.  When we finally did find it Julian almost drove into the middle of what appeared to be their abbatoir - a smallish piece of concrete with a good scattering of what looks like salt and a few remaining tufts of hair.  We got some fantastic skirt steak for a stir fry. This is a really nice cut, that is highly prized in France for making the official 'steak frites', but can be a bit hard to come by  elsewhere.  I also picked up along with bacon a small piece of black pudding to try out for breakfast tomorrow.

We're finally testing our camping gear: after a lot of research I've gone with the Optimus Terra cookset - two pots that fit neatly into a neoprene bag, plus a frypan on top which is also a lid.  The neat thing with this set is that the bag means that you can bring your rice or pasta to the boil, then keep them hot (and cooking) in the neoprene bag whilst you cook the accompaniment in another pot on the stove.  I went the whole hog and got the kettle to match as well, on the theory that it will be a huge luxury to have a non garlic tasting cup of something with breakfast, and since the kettle fits inside the cook set it won't take up any extra space.