Page 70 of Crosswind

He is delighted. I can feel it without looking at him.

We go to the terrace.

It is a good spot — a café on the hill above the runway threshold, the approach path directly overhead, aircraft coming in low over the rice fields and the coast. Patrick sets up with his phone and his small tripod and begins filming. I sit beside him with a coffee and watch.

I have watched hundreds of hours of this version of him on a screen. Sitting beside him in person at the approach end of a runway in Bali is a different thing entirely.

At some point I notice an aircraft on final and say, without particularly directing it at anyone: "737 MAX 8. Split tip winglets, not blended. And the engine nacelles sit differently under the wing — slightly higher, more forward."

Patrick doesn't respond.

I glance at him.

He has the camera pointing at me. He has, I understand from the angle and the small smile, been pointing it at me for at least the last thirty seconds.

"You filmed that," I say.

"How do you know about the winglets," he says. Still filming.

"You did a twenty-minute video on it in 2022," I say. "737 Classic versus NG versus MAX. The comparison was very clear."

He lowers the camera. Looks at the screen. Looks at me. Looks at the screen again.

"This," he says, with the look of someone who has found something they intend to keep, "is going to be amazing."

"Patrick." I look at him.

He is looking at the screen, then at me, then at the screen again — the expression of someone who has just found something they cannot quite believe. "Jan, you just correctly identified a MAX 8 by its winglets while having a coffee."

"It's not difficult." I pick up the coffee in question.

"For most people it absolutely is." He is already watching the clip back. His expression, the delight, uncontained, entirely his. "You're going in the video."

"I didn't agree to…”

"You're already in it." He looks up. "You look great, by the way."

I look at the aircraft on approach.

"Don't push it," I say.

Patrick is absolutely delighted.

He films for another hour, asking me questions, which I answer with the same precision I apply to everything. We watch Garuda and Batik Air on approach and Patrick narrates and I occasionally correct small errors which he finds, for reasons I don't fully understand, even more delightful than the corrections themselves.

Then a Singapore Airlines 787 pushes back from the gate below us at the same moment a Singapore Airlines A350 turns onto final approach.

I put my coffee down.

"Look at that," I say.

Patrick looks. Both aircraft, same livery, same airline, one departing and one arriving, crossing each other's paths in the particular choreography of a busy airport afternoon.

"The A350 is a better aircraft," I say.

Patrick looks at me. "In what way."

"In most ways." I watch the A350 on its approach… the curved wingtips, the way it sits in the air. "The cabin is wider. The seats have more room. The humidity is higher so you land less dehydrated." I pause. "The 787 is very good. The A350 is beautiful."