A final piece to the walk.

Today was my last visit to Montrose in respect of my walking. I wanted to have a look at the air heritage museum at my walks end as it now opens during the summer months, and I was not disappointed. Kate, Ian and Tony, volunteers at the museum showed me around this remarkable piece of preservation. The collection is vast and eclectic, including a Sopworth Camel aircraft, a parachute silk wedding dress, an evacuee child’s suitcase , a radio that plays Glen Miller even though its internal workings are missing ?, an ejector seat and trench art from the first world war. In a vast hangar Tony works with a team building a B.E 2a  WW1 plane. He showed me the inner workings, how the wings and the rudder move, before returning to quietly and slowly sewing the canvas onto the wings. The crew have built it entirely from a set of drawings. Ian, in a capacious wartime airforce overcoat and officers cap told stories about the base and the crews that flew from Montrose. He told about the night a Polish airman was visiting a girl in Bents Road when a German Heinkel bomber jettisoned a bomb that landed on the street. He went out,picked up the incendiary, put it in a barrow and wheeled it down to the beach where he blew it up with his Lee Enfield rifle. A brilliantly interesting, funny, and moving place to visit. My second plan was to find a location for the short film myself and a couple of friends are making for the show. It connects walking a line and meeting people, two central themes to my work. The film is called ‘Should we meet sometime’, and will play downstairs in the ropeworks. This building is incredibly long and narrow, disappearing into darkness at the far end. There is a wooden runway for the viewer to walk down, and as they do so they will see a small flickering film in the distance . I need a location with a long enough stretch of open space, and being one of those rare days when things come together, the old wartime airfield behind the museum has such a space – what deduction…