My wife wants to buy me birthday and Christmas presents that are actual ‘things’, but the best gifts she’s ever given me have been experiences that involve avoiding death.

I’ve floated through the Dordogne in a hot air balloon, learned to fly an engineless glider to 4000 feet (and down again), and to drive a Ferrari California so fast that the three-time European Rally Champion looking after me asked to do one more lap. “What do you do for a living?” he asked. “Getaway driver?”

Ten years ago this week, I read a Spectator article about flying, with a quote so memorable I snapped it:

I love flying. I took off yesterday from Amsterdam and landed in Vancouver barely 20 minutes after I’d taken off. What’s not to love about that? Time travel!

Learning to glide taught me that the witty quote is, in fact, truth. Flying is about being in the air. Pilots think of landing as a crash you walk away from.

When you learn to fly it’s all about avoiding “buying the farm”, as US Air Force pilots coined it (the farm represents the payout your family gets if you do crash in service. The British Royal Air Force talked about '“buying the [burial] plot”, a sign that the public service in my homeland has always been undervalued).

Gliding involves finding heat. Without it you don’t go up. You go down. Eventually you crash.

Heat rises from hills and mountains, so you sail close to the wind coming off those hills and mountains, in every sense. Go close enough, you go high enough. Too far, and you’ll sink. And you’ll buy the farm.

Are you always seeking the heat, flying close to the wind? Have you learned how to avoid not flying?

For me, not flying is a feeling. It’s a feeling that has woken me up at 4am, and kept me awake until midnight.

When it happens, I get stuck into learning once more how to avoid not flying. There’s always something new to learn, or something I’d forgotten I’d learned in the first place.

When you start to worry that you’re sinking closer to the farm, it’s time to learn. It’s about finding people who know about the thing that is going to keep you in the air.

We’re here. If you think you’re drifting towards the farm, just hit ‘reply’. I’ll answer and we can work out what it’ll take to get flying again.