Painting and Planes

I was part of one of those painting programmes, where they get amateurs in to paint a still life and judge them. We were in a studio surrounded on three sides by full windows looking out over the sea and beach of a tourist town.

The time was up, and my painting was of a vase. It wasn't finished, and it was awful. I heard the judges, and I smeared purple paint over the front of the vase in an arty way, before handing it in. As the judges started talking I heard the sound of a propeller driven plane buzzing past the window. I looked and it was horribly close as it went by. The other contestants looked at it, and one of the judges said that they would call the police.

As we watched, the plane came around again, and did a loop-the-loop over the sea, but it hadn't given itself enough room and smacked into the sea with a horrible splash. There was no explosion, and as the water settled there was the wreckage of another two or three similar planes floating in the water. The judge started to call the coastguard.