60 Mile High Club

"Ladies and gentlemen, this is your captain speaking. An indicator in the cockpit is telling us we have a hot undercarriage. We are going to lower the landing gear at cruising altitude to cool it down. You may hear a slight noise, but don't worry - this is normal operating procedure."

You would be forgiven for thinking this is a line from a disaster movie, delivered just before a packed airliner spirals earth-bound out of control. But this was real life. It occurred about twenty minutes into a Virgin Atlantic flight from JFK to London Heathrow whilst I was wedged into my economy seat.

The gentle hum of the A340's landing gear deploying was quickly replaced by the loudest "whooshing" noise of turbulent air I have ever heard. A tall ship in a wind tunnel wouldn't make as much noise as this. My mind raced away with me. Was the aircraft going to stall and nosedive? Would the hot undercarriage melt a key electrical wire and ignite a fuel tank? Or were the wheels going to drop off and ruin our landing?

In the end, it was all quite uneventful. The -55oC air temperature quickly did its job and cooled the hot wheels, and the landing gear folded back into the streamlined fuselage. The dull drone of the aircraft engines filled the cabin once more and we continued eastward across the great expanse of the Atlantic.

Flying and I have a love-hate relationship. I love aircraft. I love watching them as they gracefully cut through an azure blue sky or hover in suspended animation on final approach. I have a credit card which earns free flights to anywhere in my home town if I spend over £75,000 ($150,000).

But I hate getting on aircraft. I tense up at the moment of strapping myself in. I relax a little once the seat belt light goes out. I tense up again during turbulence no more gusty than the average fart. I relax again once it stops. Then I tense up as the nose dips for the descent into our destination airport. If I were strapped up to an electrocardiogram, the line would resemble something from Disneyworld or Alton Towers.

It's nothing less than phenomenal how quickly the aviation industry has developed. Only fifty years after the Wright brothers' first struggled into the air in a rickety wood and canvas airframe, Britain was laying down plans to build a supersonic airliner. Concorde made its maiden flight on 2 March 1969 and whilst its commercial success is a matter of debate, no other supersonic airliner has come close to rivalling it, even 40 years on.

And the innovation continues. In the last few days, Richard Branson's Virgin Galactic has unveiled an aircraft that will launch two crew and six passengers on a sub-orbital flight into space. This aircraft will propel its occupants to a height of 60 miles (100km) above the earth's surface at a speed of 2,500 mph. The first flight is expected in around 18 months time and a seat is yours for a cool £100,000 ($200,000). More than 250 people have already signed up. How long before the '60 Mile High Club' has its inaugural members?

Aviation is seriously big business. It has been estimated that global aviation is a $880 billion industry, accounting for 10% of global GDP and employing some 14 million people. In July 2008, Etihad (the Abu-Dhabi based airline) bought £21.5 billion ($43 billion) worth of new aircraft from Boeing and Airbus in one go, eclipsing the previous largest aircraft order in the world. In the UK alone, passenger numbers are expected to grow from 200 million a year now to 500 million a year by 2030.

But this growth will not be without its costs. Friends of the Earth estimate that this expansion will see a doubling of carbon emissions. They claim that aviation is already the fastest growing source of carbon emissions. More flights means more noise pollution for those living around airports and under flight paths. And a desire for bigger and more numerous airports could lead to a loss of wildlife habitats and green field landscapes. I must admit that my love of air travel (whilst I'm on terra firms at least) and its environmental impact is something I struggle to reconcile.

Whilst it's impossible for those of us addicted to air travel to wean ourselves off it completely, my hope is that a bunch of very clever tree-hugging geniuses will discover the key to making flying and the environment better buddies.

Sale of the century

I read with some interest the other day about one of the largest land deals in history.

By a treaty dated 30 April 1803, the United States agreed to buy the Louisiana Territory (modern day Louisiana, Missouri, Arkansas, Iowa, Nebraska, North Dakota, South Dakota and Oklahoma) from the French Republic. Thomas Jefferson led the negotiations with France and altogether agreed to buy some 2,144,000 sq km (828,000 sq mi) of real estate. With one sweep of a pen, Jefferson doubled the size of the United States.

Why did this transaction capture my imagination so much? Well, there was a lot of land involved. And this was an important, historic step in the development of the United States as a country. But that wasn't it. What really captured my imagination was the price Jefferson agreed to pay to France - $15 million (60 million francs) - roughly 3 cents per acre.

Yes - 3 cents per acre!

There are few things in life more satisfying than bagging a bargain. I have spent hours using comparison websites to track down the cheapest widgets – and then looking for discount codes to save even more. 3 or 4 hours online to save £20 on a hotel booking is not uncommon. At those rates I'm working at below minimum wage, but it's immensely gratifying nonetheless.

The Louisiana Purchase (as Jefferson's real estate shopping spree later became known) got my mind racing about some of the other greatest bargains in history. And there have been some absolute gems:

In October 1987, stock markets crashed across the world. A year later, legendary investor, Warren Buffett, started buying up a lot of Coca-Cola stock on the cheap and many of Wall Street's finest thought "he was downright crazy" to do so. Buffett eventually bought up 7% of the company. He would see his $1 billion investment grow into a $10 billion stake generating more than a quarter-billion dollars a year in dividends. Buffett once said, "If you gave me $100 billion and said take away the soft drink leadership of Coca-Cola in the world, I’d give it back to you and say it can’t be done."

A lucky shopper bagged himself an extraordinary bargain whilst rummaging around a flea market in Philadelphia. He bought a ghastly painting by an unknown artist for $4 because he liked the picture frame. When he got the picture home and prised off the back so that he could discard the painting, he found that a piece of folded paper had been used as padding. Upon unfolding that loose page, he discovered an original printing of the Declaration of Independence. It was sold at auction in 1991 for $2.42 million.

It looks like I'm not alone in my quest for a bargain. The ongoing 'credit crunch' has put a squeeze on the finances of many, and an unexpected side effect has been a growth in the popularity of car boot sales. While the idea of wading through a muddy field examining junk arranged in the back of an old banger is some people's idea of hell, others can't get enough of it. When you see some of the bargains to be had, a pretty strong case for donning your wellington boots and getting out there can be made:

• An 18th-century painting of cats by the artist Henrietta Ronner-Knip cost £0.50 and was sold at auction for £22,000
• An autographed Rolling Stones album bought for £2.00 made £4,000
• A certificate awarded to an officer who rescued Titanic survivors in 1912 was bought for £10 and is worth £3,000
• A Fabergé vodka cup bought for £0.20 sold at auction for £2,000
• A letter from Abraham Lincoln bought for £1 is estimated to be worth £500,000

I'm off to start swotting up on the Antiques Almanac. Happy bargain hunting!

Lost and not found

I lost my credit card the other day, for the umpteenth time. I went to pay for some all-in-one dishwasher, denture cleaning and coffee sweetening tablets (or something like that) and discovered my flexible friend was missing.

I knew this was nothing more sinister that old fashioned absentmindedness. I hit the now familiar speed dial on my phone and was connected to my credit card company twenty-five minutes later. "Good morning sir", answered the condescending female voice, "Misplaced your card again, have you?" The conversation may have started a little differently from this, but after a few moments I was grateful my card had been cancelled and a new one was on its way.

I lose stuff all the time – keys, socks, files on my computer. And I nearly lost a dog once too. Not some farty little Chihuahua, but a fully grown Alsatian. It was my first day of house-sitting for friends and I really didn't want to make the call to say I'd lost their beloved dog not two hours after they'd left on vacation. Thankfully, the obtuse canine turned up in its own time and acted as if nothing had ever happened.

When I lose things, it tends to cause me inconvenience, sometimes mild irritation (or terrible fright in the case of the missing dog). But when governments lose stuff down the back of the political sofa, it has the potential to cause hysteria and seismic bowel movements.

Stuff is always falling out of the pocket of the UK government.

In November 2007, HM Revenue & Customs lost two CDs containing the names, addresses, dates of birth, bank account details and National Insurance numbers (similar to Social Security numbers) of 25 million people, over 40% of the UK's population. HMRC had unwittingly released 'The Dummies Guide to Identity Theft' to a would be fraudster.

And it doesn't stop there. Agencies which should know how to keep important assets safe (you know, information on national security and that sort of thing) lose a lot of stuff too. In 2000, an officer from the Security Service (MI5) had a laptop stolen from him on the London Underground. Two weeks later, a colleague from the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6) mislaid a laptop containing classified information - after having a few drinks in a tapas bar. I don't recall 007 having lost anything after a visit to the local hostelry.

We should be grateful that the UK tends only to lose vital information. Other governments have tendencies to lose nuclear weapons.

Greenpeace estimates that since 1945, some 50 nuclear weapons have been lost - and remain - at sea. Perhaps Iran and Syria should stop building reactors and send more people on PADI courses. Another report indicated that Russia cannot account for around 100 'suitcase nukes'. Rumours that Samsonite is responsible cannot be confirmed at this time.

The US Department of Defense is so confident of losing nuclear bombs on a regular basis that in 1993 it published Directive 5230.16 - Nuclear Accident and Incident Public Affairs (PA) Guidance. The introduction to the Directive states that it is intended: "to prevent public alarm in the event of accidents or significant incidents involving nuclear weapons or nuclear components, radioactive material, nuclear weapon launch or transport vehicles (when a nuclear weapon is aboard), or nuclear reactors under DoD control." I feel better already.

I'm off to write a proposal paper on the establishment of a lost nuclear weapons hotline. When a government loses another nuke, it simply calls 1-800-NOT-AGAIN, presses 1 for a downed aircraft, 2 for a sunken submarine or 3 for any other misadventure. The nuke then gets cancelled and a new one gets sent out by DHL. Could come in useful, couldn't it?

Kamikaze gateaux

I walked into the kitchen and stooped down to carefully remove a sumptuous gateaux from the fridge. I could hear the background chatter of friends and relatives gathered to celebrate my birthday. I firmly took hold of the serving plate and began to gently withdraw it from the fridge, twisting and turning it to avoid other chilled foods. Unbeknown to me, the friction between the cake and serving plate eased just enough for gravity to take hold and set the dessert on a kamikaze course. In a blur of slow motion I witnessed the cake leave the safety of the plate, tumble through the air and land in a heaped splodge on the tiled floor. The dreaded mishap had reared its ugly head once again.

Mishaps form an integral part of my life. No matter how careful I am, they strike when I least suspect it. Debonair is what I aspire to. But accident prone is what I have become.

My own mishaps come in all shapes and sizes. Cake-bombing ranks at the more farcical end of things. At the more costly end of the spectrum, I once turned too sharply while reversing out of a parking space and wrapped the car's front wheel arch around the only darn tree on the entire street. I was driving my parents' car at the time.

The pinnacle of my career in calamity occurred during the early stages of dating my wife. My now father-in-law kindly lent his beloved car to his daughter to enable her to come down and visit me. With the very best of intentions, I suggested we refuel the car as a thank you. (Before you embarrass me by gushing about my generosity, I should point out that this was in the days of much lower oil prices.) I learned the hard way that diesel cars do not run very well on unleaded petrol. As you can imagine, this wasn't the best way for a would be suitor to impress his new girlfriend's father.

As a doofus, I relate to very well to mishaps of all kinds. It is probably for this reason that I take immense pleasure in observing the simple mishaps (as opposed to tragedies) of other people.

Mishaps are no respecter of age, status, nationality or celebrity. As we will see, old people, government agencies, business men and women and pioneering explorers have all been victims of the unwelcome blunder.

93 year old Welsh driver, Jack Higgs, did not have an accident in 76 years of motoring. But when he did experience his first accident, he did it in style. He caused £60,000 ($120,000) worth of damage to two Porsches sat outside a dealership. The former Pentecostal minister said, "I just don't know what happened except that I lost control as I was reversing and suddenly I had hit the cars… The next thing I knew I was hanging upside down in my car thanking my lucky stars I was still alive." Just how the pensioner managed to get his compact hatchback airborne and complete a 180 degree flip – in reverse gear - seems to defy the laws of physics. We can be thankful that Jack was completely fine and, more so, that he's now given up driving.

High-tech government agencies are not without their mishaps. And when they do experience mishaps, they tend to cost big bucks. I read that NASA lost a Mars Climate Orbiter because a Lockheed Martin engineering team used English imperial units of measurement while NASA's team used the more conventional metric system. A report confirmed that the units mismatch prevented navigation information from transferring between the Orbiter spacecraft team in Denver, Colorado and the flight team in Pasadena, California. The Oribter burned up in the atmosphere of Mars - and a cool $125 million went up in smoke.

One of my favourite historical mishaps was by 16th century English explorer, Martin Frobisher. After exploring the Arctic region of Canada, Frobisher excitedly returned to England with his boat dangerously laden with 1,500 tons of gold. Close examination of Frobisher's bounty determined it was not gold, but worthless iron pyrite. Undeterred, our intrepid explorer set sail once again for Canada, found another 1,300 tons of gold and sailed home with his boat creaking at the seems. An exasperated Royal assayer confirmed that Frobisher had again returned with worthless iron ore. Not the sharpest tool in the box, you might agree. Needless to say, Frobisher very quickly dropped off history's radar.

More recently, a typing error by a broker at Japanese bank Mizuho Securities cost his company $225 million (27 billion yen). Instead of selling 1 share in J-Com for 610,000 yen (£2,893 / $5,065), he sold 610,000 shares for 1 yen each (0.47 pence / 0.8 cents) – a bargain in anyone's book. The order represented 41 times the outstanding number of J-Com's shares, but still went through the trading system. Mizuho had to buy back as much of the stock as it could and was left with a very large bill indeed.

Cock-up, blunder, fiasco, misfortune. Call it what you like, but the results are usually nothing less than spectacular. Mishaps are a bit like hiccups. Whilst we don't welcome them with open arms, life would be a bit dull without them.

Wish me luck. I'm off to help carry a large sheet of plate glass across a very busy road.

Chicken twisters

Impenetrable thick black clouds, fierce lightning storms and grapefruit-sized hail stones. No, I'm not describing a typical British summer but the weather conditions which precede the birth of a tornado – one of Mother Nature's most destructive forces.

I am one of those nerdy people who don't just skip past the Discovery and National Geographic channels, but actually stops at them… and then watches programmes… entire programmes. It gets worse. I use Sky+ series link to make sure I never miss my favourite documentaries. I have well and truly turned into my dad.

I've recently been fascinated by programmes on tornadoes in the United States. I have been both enthralled by this incredible phenomenon of nature and horrified by the destruction they bring to people and property.

The most dangerous tornadoes frequently occur in the area of the US known as Tornado Alley. In general terms, Tornado Alley is a strip extending down the mid-west of the US stretching from North Dakota to the Texas panhandle. At it widest point, the Alley stretches between eastern Colorado and mid-Ohio.

Now for the techy bit (which I have no doubt overly simplified in my scientific ignorance).

Supercell thunderstorms (long-living thunderstorms with a continuously rotating updraft of air) can spawn the most violent tornadoes. Supercells are most common in Tornado Alley because it is here that the warm, moist tropical air from the Gulf of Mexico meets the cooler, drier air coming in from the Rockies. The warmer air is forced upwards by the cooler air and, as this rising air meets changing wind speeds and directions, if conditions are just right, the updraft will begin to rotate like a spinning top (a mesocyclone). A funnel cloud can reach out towards the ground from the bottom of a supercell and, if it touches terra firma, a tornado is born. I think I need a lie down after all that.

Whilst the subject of tornadoes is a very serious one, I couldn't help but smile at the following bizarre (but true) story I stumbled upon.

The damage descriptions of rural tornadoes will often make mention of chickens being stripped clean of every feather on their bodies. In 1842, Elias Loomis decided to use this seemingly innocent fact to grow his knowledge of tornado wind velocities. As you will read, he performed an experiment that left much to be desired in the control of experimental variables.

Loomis's eureka moment gave him the revelation that if he could learn the wind speed needed to de-feather a chicken, he would gain an insight into wind velocities inside tornadoes. Loomis knew the speed at which a cannon ball was propelled by a cannon – 341 miles per hour - and he made the leap that by firing a chicken out of a cannon, if it was de-feathered, it would be a good benchmark to measure tornado wind speeds. He was about to discover that there was a very good reason why the Spanish Armada didn't attack Britain's Navy with chickens.

Our hero pointed the cannon into the air, loaded it with his organic ammo and fired. The resulting explosion didn't just pluck every feather from the chickens, but also blasted their tiny little bodies into particles so small they were difficult to find afterwards. Predictably, his experiment ended with messy, and unreliable, results.

Tornadoes are classified according to the Fujita scale which measures their wind speeds. A F0 tornado will have wind speeds of 40 – 72 mph whereas a deadly F5 tornado will have wind speeds of 261 – 318 mph. It was a F5 twister which struck Moore, Oklahoma in 1999.

The F5 tornado was one of 66 tornadoes to touch down in Oklahoma state during a three day interval starting on 3 May 1999. Forty-eight people lost their lives during this outbreak and damage in excess of $1 billion was inflicted on local communities. This was the most prolific tornado outbreak in Oklahoma state history.

The power harnessed by tornadoes is quite incredible. There were reports that a tornado tearing through Broken Bow, Oklahoma lifted a motel sign and carried it some 30 miles before dumping it in Arkansas.

No doubt the Tindall family from Amherst, Kansas thought they had a lucky escape when their house was the only property on their block left unscathed by a tornado that ripped through their town. Their relief was short lived as their house was struck by lightning a week later and burned to the ground. You couldn't make it up, could you?

Wedged into a cramped minibus for six, long days with thirteen other bodies and covering, on average, over 500 miles per day. Stopping for short breaks to answer the call of nature and to load up on yet more junk food to keep you going. Leaving your dodgy looking motel at the break of dawn and arriving at a new one at around 01:00 am after a gruelling day. Getting up early the next morning to start all over again.

Sound like a blast? Well believe it or not, this is the description of a holiday adrenaline junkies pay good money to go on. Perhaps the only draw (and I can think of very few others) is that you may get the chance of seeing a fierce rotating grey funnel bearing down on you at some speed. Storm chasing tourism has arrived. Wish you were here?

Now those of us living in the UK may be counting our blessings that we don't live in Tornado Alley. But be afraid, be very afraid. The UK gets hit by as many as 100 tornadoes per year, but most go unreported. They tend to be a lot smaller than their American cousins, with much slower wind speeds. So you needn't be that afraid after all. Why did I ever make such a fuss?

Please excuse me. I'm off now to see if How It's Made has started on the Discovery Channel.

Coffee and sheep don't mix

I love coffee. I love going to coffee shops even more, especially to enjoy a nice cup of the black stuff, as opposed to some other tasty beverage. I enjoy the exposed brick work surroundings, the miss matched leather chairs and people watching the 'society' ladies for whom this is a vital daily engagement.

My favourite tipple is an Americano - an espresso with hot water. I normally enjoy it with a little hot milk, but if I'm feeling a bit sans souci, I take it black.

At home I tend to use a cafetière to make my favourite cup and will either grind the beans myself (at times when I feel especially cultured) or use the ready ground packs from the supermarket. Wherever possible I steer well clear of the instant stuff. I am an unashamed coffee snob.

Coffee has been drunk for centuries. Reports tell us of coffee beans being boiled in water and consumed in certain parts of the Middle East as far back as 1000 AD. One legend has it that a shepherd from Ethiopia, named Kaldi, noticed the effect coffee beans had on the behaviour of his sheep as they chomped away at the little red "cherries" in their new pasture. Paying homage to the phrase "that which does not kill us makes us stronger", Kaldi sampled a few of the cherries himself and was soon running around the field like a mad man surrounded by mad sheep. Just when you thought things couldn't get any worse for the shepherd on a caffeine trip, a monk stops by and scolds him for partaking of the "devil's fruit." The monks quickly changed their tune though when they discovered this fruit helped them to stay awake for their nightly prayers.

The best cup of coffee I ever sank was in my former office, I kid you not. A more junior colleague treated me to a small bag of Jamaican Blue Mountain coffee (no doubt because I'd just handed in my resignation). I'm told, by Wikipedia, that Blue Mountain is one of the most expensive coffees in the world, and tasting it you can see why. It’s incredibly smooth with no bitterness. The Japanese are nuts for it and will pay anything up to $10 (£5) per cup. I must say it was a very welcome break from the usual stale stuff we refuelled on at our desks.

The worst cup I ever tried was from the vending machine in my local leisure centre. It was like tarmac (or asphalt to our American cousins) meets sweaty feet. Jamaican Blue Mountain this was not. It was so awful, I started drinking the oxtail soup instead. Desperate times call for desperate measures.

Coffee is a drink that means different things to different cultures.

To this day, Bedouins will serve a small cup of viscous black coffee to visitors. I have my suspicions that they are really serving surplus oil scented with a little coffee essence, but haven't been able to confirm this. Either that or they use the same caterer as my office.

Italians, on the other hand, will savour their coffee as they round off a good meal. If you're ever in Rome, or some other place in Italy where they drink coffee (which is pretty much everywhere), enjoy a nice espresso after your lunch rather than that cappuccino you're hankering after. The espresso is much lighter and less stodgy, but still gives you that caffeine kick up the backside to keep you going through the afternoon. You know what they say, when in Rome… and all that.

It has been reported that coffee can lower your risk of diabetes, Parkinson's disease and colon cancer – what a drink! Pomegranate juice begins to look like chocolate thick shake with extra ice cream in comparison.

A Turkish proverb says: "Coffee should be black as Hell, strong as death, and sweet as love." Now I should clarify at this point that I don't work in advertising. Unless you're marketing a special coffee aimed at Goths, use another strap line – this one scares the hell out of me.

Some useless coffee statistics for your delectation:

• 27% of US coffee drinkers and 43% of German drinkers add a sweetener to their coffee. (Heathens.)
• Among coffee drinkers in the US, the average consumption is 3.1 cups of coffee per day. (Why does anyone bother to make a tenth of a cup of coffee? Go on, be crazy - have that fourth cup.)
• Branded coffee chains now have more than 3,000 outlets in the UK with a turnover of around £1.3 billion. (That's more readies than the GDP of the Faroe Islands.)
• Those who drink on average at least 2.37 cups of coffee per day are, on average, drinking less coffee than those who drink on average at least 3.43 cups of coffee per day. (I made this one up.)

I'm off now to take my coffee beans out of the freezer, pull the grinding machine down from the shelf, take the cafetière out of the cupboard, grind the beans, do battle with the plunger on the cafetière and then wash up all the appliances whilst trying not to get coffee granules on every surface.

That old jar of instant is suddenly looking a lot more attractive right about now…