The highlight of my lockdown weekend was finding this while doing some clearing in my parents attic.

Written by my grandmother, who’s 90 now, to my mother at her student house in Manchester, in February 1977 on a Concorde flight to what we presume was Washington. For anyone struggling with the writing, she notes it was louder than a usual flight, but otherwise felt no different, there was a good lunch and lots of champagne.

Her and grandpa did it quite a lot (until the tax man caught up with grandpa) - he often talks about being one of 5 passengers on one of the first flights from New York down to Barbados, where they basically sat with the cockpit door open the whole way while the captain gave them various updates. He’s a bit less keen to talk about the time he was turned away at the aircraft door for having a fake ticket, which he bought at what he calls a “bucket shop”!