Time to try defying gravity

OH! I have slipped the surly bonds of earth,/And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings,’ wrote John Gillespie Magee in his sonnet High Flight. The Second World War pilot may have flown lark-like in a Spitfire, but that feeling of liberation, lift and those ‘wind-swept heights’ conveyed can equally be applied to ballooning.

‘That’s a poetic way of looking at it,’ acknowledges 82-year-old Don Cameron, a ballooning pioneer both in the air and in his business, Cameron Balloons, which is half a century old this year. ‘Ballooning has a beauty to it, a magic and a mystery—you are defying gravity and you never quite