This is mousie reclining with a bi-plane over her head. Read on:
It’s not all “plough the fields and scatter” around our village at the moment.
It’s not what’s on the land that’s the problem but what is above it.
There is a very contentious issue here to do with a small private air strip. It belongs
to a local elderly farmer, well past his loop the loop days. It is a mere couple of miles as the crow flies from my dad’s farm. “He Can’t hear nowt. He doesn’t know what all the fuss is about. New folks coming in, sticking their oars in”.
I was somewhat taken aback the other day on my rounds of Parish Magazine drop to the small hamlet where my dad and a handful of people reside. Posters has been strategically
placed proclaiming “STOP AIRPORT EXPANSION NOW”!! Now Stanstead is about a 90 minute drive away so I was rather startled.
It turns out that said elderly farmer has leased out his little landing strip to a Flying School where one can train and “keep one’s hours up” etc. They surreptitiously took on
the site in 2004 and have gradually, but not quietly, been increasing the flying hours.
When I was little and flying farmer was a young man, he only took to the skies about once a week if that. We would run up the meadow to watch him - this would be in the 1960’s and I knew no one else with their own plane. It was as treat, a thrill, a novelty.
Before the days of Health and Safety and huge insurance premiums, at the village fete he
would “do rides” so we could stare down and look at the farm, the river, the horses, the cattle, our school and the fete, but never so low as to see the mice!
How things have changed. It appears that flying farmer had planning permission for 250
air movements a year; take off and landing being two movements. He, of course, never came anywhere near exceeding that total. One or two in later years flew their microlights from there.
The nubies of the surrounding villages have been sitting in their gardens counting air movements, counting them out and counting them in. In the past year there have been, according to the plane police, 1200 movements. Some have bought rather large expensive
homes not knowing that lurking down the road and behind the farm was an airfield.
Totally innocuous, benign until the weekends.
The huge windsock that can be seen from miles away could have given a bit of a clue.
But there, that’s it in a nutshell. Deaf dad can’t hear them and isn’t bothered and to be fair, the planes seem to take off in a totally different direction to his. The Boden Bunnies, the weekenders, and I imagine they are in the majority, want it stopped. So action is being taken, meetings are being held in village halls and petitions rattled round.
Now I happen to know that the head honcho of a very major department store has bought himself a weekend farm (yes you heard right) almost adjoining the airfield.
Why, one asks?
I read his profile the other day in the financial papers; hobbies included the countryside and piloting his own private plane.
Not sure which way this one is going to go, but will keep you all posted.
Aircraft noise is a huge pernicious problem now in the countryside and something like this development, which brings a bit of work into a small village, is a tough call.
As I walk out to shut up the buildings and check the locks, I look up to my black but starlit Suffolk sky, I see amongst the celestial wonders, several twinkling lights of planes several thousands of feet up – silence for me but not for everyone.

Now the helicopters from RAF Wattisham, now that's a whole new ball game. One to be discussed later, plus the new stacking systems out of Stanstead and Luton - the worry of it all here in Suffolk. No longer sleepy or sleeping.