Houston, we have a problem.

“Houston, we have a problem” - the very famous transmission from Mr Lovell on Apollo 13. So famous, even us dogs use it. Mum says that when she was flying back to France over the English Channel at 14,000 feet in Uncle Hugh’s flying car, and the engine stopped, she suddenly understood how Mr Lovell and his pals must have felt.

Honestly, she is a right drama queen sometimes. Agreed, it must have been a tad scary, especially for someone who’s afraid of flying, but the Apollo 13 guys were floating around in space. Even at 14,000 feet, which is fairly high, Mum, Uncle Hugh, 'le Fred' and his girlfriend were much closer to the ground. True, they no longer had any power, but they were much closer to the ground. Saying that, I suppose it could be a bad thing – being in a flying car that no longer had a working engine and being close to the ground. Bummer! Better to be floating in space, I guess.

Anyway, I’m digressing. Mum said that after the engine stopped and Uncle Hugh got on the radio and said “Jersey Tower we are a Cessna 210 with complete engine failure. Request emergency landing” she said she thought “Oh dear!” (Actually, what she REALLY said she thought is totally unprintable – I didn’t even know words like that existed). Then she said that she felt like screaming and crying hysterically, but decided that shouting “WE’RE ALL GOING TO DIE! WE’RE GOING TO CRASH AND BURN!” wouldn’t have brought anything to the table whilst Uncle Hugh was calmly trying to sort out the vectors with Jersey Tower. Instead, she decided to remain very still and say nothing. And that’s what she did – remained very, very still. Petrified – I think that was one of the words she used when she was telling her English friend, Amanda – along with some other rather rude ones.

Mum said that pilots are trained to do emergency landings and I’ve heard Uncle Hugh talking about glide slopes, rates of descent, high and fast approaches and stuff like that. However, mum says that it’s not really the same because in training if they get it a bit wrong, they can put the power back on, fly back off and have another go. Apparently all these thoughts were rolling around her head as they were doing a spiral descent over the little island of Jersey.

She said that she’d heard of people having their life pass before their eyes when they’re in a life-threatening situation. Not her. All she could think about at one point was that she’d wished she’d had the chocolate cheesecake and that second bottle of champagne the previous night, instead of being good and saying “No”.

Luckily, ‘le Fred’ is a super pilot and professional instructor with over 10,000 hours experience and Uncle Hugh has a brilliant brain and can do mental arithmetic dead fast, so together they saved everyone’s life, which is a good thing. They got the glide slope, the speed and their calculations just right and landed without a hitch. Mum didn’t see any of it ‘cause she had her eyes closed. She even closes her eyes when she’s landing in a plane that works. She said when she finally did open her eyes she couldn’t believe it.

“There were about ten thousand huge fire engines, a thousand ambulances and an enormous crowd of people on the viewing gallery. The firemen looked terribly miffed, actually. Their hoses were literally dripping with anticipation. The poor guys practice all their working lives for a serious ‘crash and burn’ and they rarely get one. I felt almost guilty that we weren’t even smoking. Saying that, if we’d had even a hint of smoke, we would have been drenched. They were chomping at the bit.”

The incident closed the whole of Jersey Airport for about half an hour.

You can actually read about it here. But it's not very exciting. Mum said that the local BBC TV people turned up but Uncle Hugh wouldn’t give an interview. He’s very private, like mum – she’ll never be a Victoria Beckham. She smiles too much and she doesn’t like attention. She said that she supposed it would have been quite exciting for the Island’s media, considering that not much goes on in Jersey. The last time she was there, “Lucky the black cat goes missing at St Brelade” was the headline in one of the local papers.

There you go – we may live in a sleepy, rural part of France but there’s always something happening with the folk in the ‘Henry’ household.

They got the plane mended. I can’t say what was wrong or whose fault it was because it might be investigated. But it’s fixed now. Some very nice men at Jersey Airport fixed it and made sure it couldn’t happen again. However, it took Uncle Hugh and 'le Fred' nearly two days to fly mum back home because she could only cope with VERY short hops – her nerves were all frazzled and frayed.

In the end, they had to ply her with copious amounts of alcohol otherwise – as Uncle Hugh said – “We wouldn’t have got back until February” That’s why I’m back later than I said I would be.

Mum’s a bit mad with Uncle Hugh ‘cause she thought they were going to go in his new flying van, which has got TWO engines. It was only when she’d turned up at the airfield that he’d told her they were going in the flying car. Mum had always told Uncle Hugh she wouldn’t go to the UK in the flying car but she didn’t want to let everyone down. Oh well. ‘Tis done. Life goes on.

I COULD HAVE BEEN AN ORPHAN! OH MY GOD – I’VE JUST THOUGHT. WHAT WOULD I HAVE DONE? WHO WOULD HAVE ADOPTED ME? Any offers Braja??????

The clip below is of me feeling good to be alive - having a good roll in the grass this afternoon and loving every minute of it (Yes, Lee – it is sweet and twee, but it is SHORT). It’s a ‘Henry’ thing. I sometimes do it next to mum when she’s doing her tummy crunches on the floor in the lounge. YES, MUM HAS FINALLY GOT A DIGI CAMERA. So something good came out of it.