Hot air balloon with Enjoy Your Journey banner

My grandfather ran the balloon for the Halverson Brothers Travelling Show, the last of the proper ones, before the council turned the field at Ashby into a car park. He had a striped envelope the colour of old brick and cream, and a wicker basket mended so often it was more knot than wicker. Every August he would stand at the mouth of the tent with the painted banner over his shoulder and tell the crowd the same thing: enjoy your journey, because the ground is the only part nobody gets to keep.

Then the summer the wind turned, the brothers sold the horses and kept the balloon, because nobody was buying balloons. Grandfather took it up alone one morning over the flat fields with a tin of biscuits and a pocket watch. He came down eleven miles off, in a turnip field, with the banner still wrapped round the envelope like a sash. A farmer's wife gave him tea and asked where he'd been. He said he'd been enjoying the journey, and she thought he was mad, which he was, a bit.

The basket's in the back now, under the sawdust. Put your hand on the rim. Feel that dip? That's where he sat for the whole of one August afternoon, watching the county shrink to a tablecloth. Nobody on the ground could tell him a single thing about it. That was the point of going up.