No green beer and shamrocks here, thank you very much! -something much more realistic.

Not believing in personal motor vehicles, I travel between the house and the playing fields where I fly it (some three miles each way) by tricycle with the rocket strapped along the side. This is the way I have been operating for some nine months with no trouble at all; why should there be? It's a good solid system.

On the way back home on this occasion I stopped to replace the cover on a manhole in the footpath, lest someone fell down the hole when I heard a car slow down behind me. First thought? 'With my luck this'll be the police and I'll have to spend the rest of the morning trying to convince them that I was not up to no good down the drains'.

Yes, the police. So I start to explain why I'm playing with road furniture as yer man gets out and heads for the trike.

    "I've been looking for you", and to the radio, "I've found him"

    "Me?"

    "Yes," says he, eyeing up the shattered remains of my rocket.

The flight wasn't an unqualified success; the camera trigger worked well but the parachute deployed early and ripped off. The flash fired on the way down, as intended, but by then the canopy was somewhere totally different and so the landing was a little rough. The camera is now a bit of a funny shape.

    "The airfield is on a high state of alert at the minute. We had a call from a member of the public reporting a man at [...] roundabout with a rocket on the back of a bicycle. We've all been out looking for you!"

We had a bit of crack, the policeman enquiring about the rocket (pausing briefly to reply to the radio that he did not require backup!); the usual sort of 'what the fuel/how high/where do you fly' questions.

Now, while I have absolutely no desire whatsoever to waste police time (and I did say as much to the officer), that made my day. How better could an Ulsterman in the south east of England mark St. Patrick's day than to be pulled by the police as a terrorist!

...and, yes, he did seem to see the funny side of it.