It was one of Under The Counter’s colleagues who sniggeringly alerted him to a story about a balloon filled with gas.
The irony was lost on the flatulent Auld Boy, however, as he got tangled up in the tale of the Torabhaig Atlantic Explorer, which this month is set to become the first hydrogen open basket gas balloon to cross the Atlantic.
This struck an alarm bell with UTC, who recalled, in 1937, watching newsreels of the hydrogen-filled airship Hindenburg burst into flames. ‘Highly’ and ‘flammable’ are pretty much all you need to know about hydrogen.
Perhaps it is the frisson of fiery foolhardiness that is spurring one of the balloon’s pilots into attempting to become the first person to cross the Atlantic three times in an open basket balloon.
Or perhaps it’s because he’s called Sir David Hempleman-Adams. With a double-barrelled name straight off the pages of a Victorian adventure novel, how could he be anything but an intrepid explorer? And he is. Davey Boy has been to the ends of the earth, up the highest mountains on every continent and – as you’ve probably realised – has quite a thing for balloons of the open basket variety.
All this, of course, pales into insignificance when held up against the Auld Boy’s feats of endurance and derring-do.
These include walking 12 miles in a pair of winklepickers after missing the last bus home when he was a lad. He was also brave enough, on one occasion, to camp overnight in Strathclyde Park. On the Bellshill side, no less.
