It all started way back in 2002.

My step sister Ruth was planning a Wing Walk for her birthday and Rachel sounded extremely interested in the idea and was definitely "up for it" herself. Silly things like this stick in your memory just in case you need them one day.

Roll forward to 2004 and it's a special year for Rachel with one of those special number birthdays (let's call it her 30th 'cos she sure doesn't look any older than that even if her daughter is 24 this year!). I started to wonder what I could do as a surprise. It had to be something special, it had to be something unusual, and it had to be something Rachel actually wanted to do. The Wing Walk sounded like the perfect idea, but how on earth do you book something like that?

Of course the internet is the place to start, but try it yourself and see how you get on. I gave up with Google and searched via Lycos. Lucky for me I found the Anthony Nolan Trust, a marvellous charity who do such a lot of good work for leukaemia sufferers. They were offering the chance to wing walk and all you had to do was donate £1000 to them to have a go. Although Rachel is worth every penny it seemed like a lot of money to risk on something she might not like, or might not even go through with. Once again the charity came to the rescue. I had mentioned the fact that Rachel and I had done the London to Brighton bike ride many times and as luck would have it the charity were doing a 50 mile sponsored bike ride in May. Any money that we raised for that would go into the account towards the wing walk. This sounded much better. If I could just raise half the money then it was a far better proposition, and I knew that Rachel had a lot of very generous and caring friends at work (Jardine Lloyd Thompson in London).

The bike ride and the wing walk were booked in early March, now all I had to do was keep it secret for a few months, raise as much sponsorship as I could without telling anybody what it was really for, and cycle 50 miles on a tandem. Easy peasy.

The bike ride was actually really good fun. The ride wasn't too difficult and the route took us around some beautiful Suffolk villages on a lovely sunny day. The sponsorship also went very well and we managed to raise £636. Even better news was that Rachel's company run a gift aid scheme where they will match "pound for pound" any money raised for a charity. I was now safe with the fee for the Wing Walk but trying to explain to Rachel why the money had to be collected and sent off by 16th July was extremely difficult. In the end I had to send a personal cheque to pay for the Wing Walk and trust that this would be returned or cancelled once the "real" cheque arrived. Once again we were lucky and managed to get all of the money together and sent off by 19th July, only just past the deadline, and my personal cheque was never cashed.

Now for the really tricky bit. Rachel was due to take-off at 9:30 on Sunday 25th July in Attleborough, Norfolk. This would be a journey of 1.5 to 2 hours for us and I didn't fancy getting up that early on a Sunday. How could I convince Rachel that we should have a nice weekend away when her birthday party was the following week and we had lots of things to get ready? A dastardly scheme was hatched between me and my good friend Pete who does a lot of professional film camera work. Recently I've been telling Rachel about the various celebrities that Pete has filmed so it seemed believable that he could be filming someone special and we were invited along. It was difficult getting everyone to believe that it really would be worth it when we wouldn't tell them who the celebrity was, but the lure of the "star" made them give in, shut up (mostly) and go along with it.

Then disaster struck. On the Thursday before the magic day I received a phone call from Melvyn Douglas (the organiser for Anthony Nolan Trust) saying that the Wing Walk was cancelled as there was a problem with the insurance. I found this extremely difficult to believe. The event had been planned for months, and had been done before. How could there suddenly be a problem? I telephoned the Utterly Butterly people directly to confirm that it really was a problem and that they had cancelled. I can't describe the feeling of utter despondency that I felt when all my scheming and planning had suddenly come to nothing. All of the cajoling and pleading that could be done, I did, but it was completely out of my hands. I arranged with Melvyn that we might as well throw Rachel out of a plane instead as she was also keen to do a sky dive, but it wasn't the same for me. Everyone sky-dives but the wing walk was special. Needless to say I was not particularly good company that night. :-((

Friday morning, still depressed, sitting at work I get a phone call from the Utterly Butterly lady, Helen Tempest, who had been so understanding the day before. Somehow, and I still don't know the real reasons behind all of this, the wing walk was back on and everything was OK for Sunday. I didn't really care why or how I was just so ecstatic that we were back on track, and so relieved that I hadn't said anything to Rachel the night before!

What could possibly go wrong now? We were set, and nothing could stop us.

Sunday morning I woke up in the Bed and Breakfast house (2 miles from the airfield where the walk would take place) to the sound of rain. For goodness sake. This was really starting to get on my nerves. Could the walk take place in the rain? Unlikely. Would the rain stop? Maybe, the forecast had been for nice weather in the morning and the chance of showers later on. Why are the forecasts in this country so pathetically inaccurate all the time?

Proceed as if everything was normal, that was the only way to approach it. We had a nice breakfast and then got ourselves ready to go out for our day "in the sun" with this mysterious celebrity.

Finally something went right. The rain stopped long enough for us to do a quick system check of the camera and sound and in doing so reveal to the family who the mystery celebrity was. To say that Rachel was stunned or gob smacked to find out it was her, and that she would be wing walking in the next hour, is the understatement of the year. All of this was captured on film, as was the subsequent walk itself, and I take this opportunity to say again what a fantastic girl Rachel is.