Cosmic tribute to Jerney Kaagman

This blog post starts off at a tangent, but bear with me: kites will feature a bit further down!

Earth & Fire was one of the most successful bands in the Netherlands throughout the 1970s. They had a string of hits in that decade, including two chart #1s ("Memories" and "Weekend"). The band broke up in 1983, followed by a brief return (and final album) in 1989.

The very first LP I ever bought as a (11 or 12 year old) boy, in the early 1970s, was one of Earth & Fire; I still have it!

Jerney Kaagman, the lead singer of Earth & Fire, passed away about a month ago, aged 79. 

Earth & Fire's music has been with me for more than 50 years now, and hearing of Jerney's passing really hit me. As the first band I ever bought music from, Earth & Fire always remained special to me. Also, I readily admit I had a big crush on Jerney as a young teenager in the 1970s (together with a high proportion of the Dutch male population then!). 

On to kites ... To try and channel my feelings upon hearing of Jerney's passing, I wanted to find an appropriate way to fly kites in her memory. Mentally going through our quiver of kites, looking for something that would 'fit', I came to our pair of Kitehouse Cosmic kites, one dark brown, one gold-orange. These seemed perfect for a 'Jerney tribute flight', with the brown Cosmic representing 'Earth' and the gold Cosmic 'Fire'.

The music we flew these Cosmics to was "Hazy Paradise", released in 1970 as the B-side to their first single ("Seasons"). No choreographed routine; simply fly, guided by the music.

In a couple of weeks time, we will be flying at Portsmouth Kite Festival, and, if circumstances allow, we intend to fly one of our routines to "Hazy Paradise", as a public tribute to Jerney Kaagman.

Jerney, RIP and thank you for more than half a century of music in my life.

Double PP with PP!

Puzzling title, eh? Read on, and all will become clear ...

It's been been well over three years since I posted on pair-flying Peter Powell kites. Main reason is that we haven't added any new PPs to out pair quiver since then. Checking the Peter Powell Kites web-site, I realised that I never did anything when Paul and Mark added the 'Bubblegum' kites to their stock a while ago. And as Flying Fish is a dual-line pair, I ordered a pair of these. Matching the pink centre panel, I felt that pink tails would be appropriate for these kites.

So here they are, on the ground and in the air!

Now, PP kites with a clear pink aspect .... doesn't that make you think of something else, with the same initials??

Exactly ...

And the Pink Panther is known to be a kite flyer; check out this "Sky Blue Pink" short movie:

Towards the end of the movie, after many mishaps with his kite, the Pink Panther finally manages to soar through the air, suspended from his kite:

Now let's bring this back to Peter Powell kites ... I can pretty much recreate this particular scene, with a PP cuddly toy suspended from a PP kite!

Now we have two of these 'bubblegum' PPs, don't we? As it happens, we also have two cuddly PPs (long story ...).

The Pink Panthers were quite exhausted from their first flight ...

I don't think anyone has ever flown a pair of Peter Powell kites with Pink Panthers suspended from them. So this is a first in the 13+ billion year history of the current universe .... 

The weight of a PP-carrying PP nearly doubled, and that was very clear when flying them. Slower, less nimble when turning, and needing more wind. And, of course, there is only one piece of music we can ever fly this pair of PP-manned PP kites to if we ever fly them at a festival:

A different version of this blog post is posted simultaneously on my Peter Powell Kites Collection blog.

'Kites Connect' Festival

Back at the Dunstable Downs, for our second appearance at the 'Kites Connect' Festival, following our debut here last year. 

Focusing, as always in my festival posts in this blog, on the sport kite arena, the pairs and teams performing were basically the same as last year.

Kicking off the day was Fracture, flying Fulcrums as a pair (Josh and Harry).

Add a few more quad flyers (Matt, Chris, Simon, Graham, Phil), and you have The Quad Mob. 

Switching to dual-line kites, Simon Franks performed again as a one-man kite pair. I really like the "Come fly with me" cover by Ruelle that he flies one of his routines to ...

Of course, a kite festival at the Dunstable Downs wouldn't be complete without the Airheads! Like last year, they flew as a 4-strong team (Pete, Vee, Keith and Doug).

Especially their tail routines are always a delight to see (although I normally see them from below, being one of their regular ground crew).

And then us! We flew as part of a 3-strong L-katz (sadly, Lisa couldn't fly with the team this festival).

Finally, of course, we flew as Flying Fish.

We mostly flew make-it-up-as-you-go-along routines, to a range of music tracks. But I do want to highlight one specifically. Years ago I had the idea of creating a routine to 'Bolero', inspired by Torvill & Dean's ice dance routine from the 1984 Winter Olympics. For all kinds of reasons, this idea never progressed, but we decided to finally make a start. We didn't have any choreography so just made it up as we flew, to test out whether we could fly to it in principle. The verdict after the weekend was a clear 'yes'. Next step is to choreograph a routine with moves and patterns that are inspired by ice dancing. The 'Bolero' track we flew to is the same edit that Torvill & Dean used in Sarajevo in 1984, by the way.

If you have the Airheads, Flying Fish and L-katz together at a kite festival, a mega-team is pretty much a given (and we were joined by Simon Franks on Sunday).

In all, we flew 26 routines during the weekend (12 with Flying Fish, 12 with L-katz, plus twice in a mega-team). My brain was ever so slightly frazzled at the close of the festival! 

I want to conclude this blog post with a lovely random encounter we had Saturday evening. We'd gone to dinner at a Thai restaurant near our B&B, still wearing our Flying Fish shirts. When we left the restaurant, a girl of maybe 10 years old came in with (I presume) her mom. As the girl saw us leave, she said: "Excuse me, did you fly kites at the Downs today?". "Yes, indeed we did." we said. And with bright shining eyes, she said "I saw you fly, I really liked it!". Reminded us of Violet at Minchinhampton Kite Day years ago. Ultimately, that's why you fly at kite festivals, isn't it?

Picture credits: Simon Hennessey (L-katz); John Saberton (L-katz); 'Facebook' (Flying Fish); 'Instagram' (mega-team)