Rocketry at Martin's Dinner Party.

Big big bastard of a rocket-shaped, phalliform, what? Behemoth, my pride and joy, a man-sized rocket, or at least a man-long rocket, or just a man long length of araldited cresta bottles, satisfied everyone predictions and disappointed my private hopes, my hopes of Behemoth, big big Behemoth blasting skywards, big big Behemoth bee-lining starwards, big Behemoth being a rocket. Behemoth was an eight cresta bottle long hs rocket, five bottles for a body, two for a skirt and one to support the paracute and nose cone. There was nothing clever about the parachute, the cone was to fall off the parachute to fall out and fill, since then I have discovered Magi-cube flashbulbs and I am working on the legendary inertial lever. On Saturday night, in Sean's back garden, at Martin's meal do, we filled Behemoth with four and a half liters of water and hs and then blew it to fragments. A dramatic explosion, a worthy end, but oh, my big baby, my Behemoth.

The meal followed and was a success, never have any of us eaten so well.

The experiments in night rocket photography were, like Behemoth, and here I say it, a failure. The idea, let me explain, is simple one, on a recant trip to visit Allie and John, Jenny and I noticed a picture on their wall of a very dark Welsh landscape across which was a meandering line of light. Apparently someone had set up a camera in the almost-to-fully dark, dark enough for a 25 minute long exposure and had someelse run, or maybe he or she him-or-her-self had run, torch bearing across the dusk-scape. We have ambitions to do something similar with rockets, that is, launch a rocket at night with a torch light and photograph its trace. James is to be our photographer, we decided to have the first try on Saturday night.

I built two 1-bottle hs rockets. One was called Con and the other Art. There were, as you might expect, so difficult to distinguish that people said Con for Art when they ment Art and Art for Con when they ment Con at least as often as they said Con for Con when they meant Con and Art for Art when they ment Art, or whatever. I also arranged to strap 2 AAA batteries and a bulb onto them.

The problem was the rockets wouldn't fly. First we tried Con, or was it Art. Everything was set up and the flash bulb flasted and the hs didn't explode. We repeated this humiliation 3 times varying the amount of hs and water. Nothing, nothing, nothing; nothing^3. Finally I relised a slight, very slight, oh so slight variation in the design of the blasting cap had gloried itself in failure. Later in the week I will write my Treatise on Blasting Caps and explain my error. A fourth attempt sent either Con or Art some 9 metres into the air, sadly by then it was too dark for the required exposure and anyway the fiercesome g's developed during launch rended the batteries from the rocket and the caused the light to go out.

The only good news really is that my new sparker works. It works again despite the Beast and Bodil breaking it while applying sparks to each others bodies. It is made out of one of the sparkers you buy to light gas rings. Andy complained that it lacked the it-works-even-though-you-wouldn't-think-it quality of the cigerette lighter sparker. He thinks the heroic days of hs rocketry are over. I intend to buy a Bertha and prove him wrong.

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