FLYING DINOSAUR KITE

The sun beat down from an eggshell-blue sky. I could smell the comforting sweetness of the new-mown grass. Queen's Park was verdant and green. I sat on a bench, happy to pause during my hour-long stroll. I watched two kites in the stiff breeze. One was shaped like a pan-loaf, the other for all the world like a Pterodactyl in full flight. Of all the flying dinosaurs, I always thought the Pterodactyl the most bland, albeit the most familiar to most people. As a young boy, I always preferred wrapping my tonsils round the other, rarer species, of which Quetzlcoatalus was the most bizarre, closely followed by Rhamporhynchus and, trailing a poor third, Pteranodon. Pterodactyl was nowhere. However, as kites went, this Pterodactyl was by far the most successful. It gyrated this way and that, darting, tumbling and swooping spectacularly, all the while making a noise like an angry hornet, unlike the real Pterodactyl, which apparently didn't make any sound at all, couldn't fly properly and instead used its wings as a sail to flop from one perch to another, rather like a giant fruit-bat.
The pan-loaf kite merely drifted, completed a half-hitch, looped-the-loop and banked over to where it had started.
A left-handed painter, his white overall covered in splashes of grey, stopped painting the east gates to the Palace of Holyroodhouse and watched the kites, as did a family playing soccer. A woman on the next bench along from me took a swig from a bottle of mineral water. An old man shambled by with his dog. It broke free and gambolled into the midst of a group of picnickers sitting on the grass. 'Pitzer!' the old man yelled, 'Come out of there! Don't worry,' he shouted to the picnickers, 'He won't hurt you. Pitzer! Come on out of there!' The sun seemed to burn a hole in my trousered thigh, whilst the wind flapped my tie about and flung my hair into crazy shapes, as if I'd been electrocuted. All the while, the Pterodactyl kite buzzed away like a two-stroke. Now there's a thing - a powered kite. I suppose that would be called a dirigible.