New Statesman Scotland - Men - we're all wee boys at heart

"The Microlight - I had to have it," Jim explained, as we drove to the field in northern France where a local farmer stored his new passion. "I was 50 and I thought, if I don't do it now . . . Mimi was great. She said the house in France was her dream; now I had to have mine."

Jim had circled the house the day before, a black speck we'd all waved at madly. He liked best to pack a bottle of wine and fly to Mont St Michel or to skim past all those chateaux of the Loire. French airspace, he'd found, was far more accommodating than the English variety.

"Jim, you know I'm crap on the back of fast bikes," I told him, remembering how my friend Pete had tried to elbow me off his back on a rocketing Goldwing. "Crap at fairground rides, too," I added, remembering how, at the top of the Magic Carpet, my fellow Aladdins were transfixed by my wide-eyed exclamations, "Oh Jeesus, Jeeesus, oh God, oh God, oh God, nooooooo!" Jim said the Microlight was nothing like that.

But two things are worth bearing in mind about Microlight flight. One is that, when you take your seat behind the pilot and curl your legs slightly around him, you look down and see nothing; nothing that suggests a machine; not even a foot-rest. Zilch. The other thing is how little time you have to accustom yourself to this psychological amputation. There is no taxiing, turning or pausing for last-minute checking; no time to breathe deeply, seek reassurance. No, half a field and you're airborne. Well, not quite so smoothly.

"No problem, Tommo," Jim commented, after one heart-stopping lurch, and proceeded to point out lots of dead-interesting natural features on either side of us. He'd told me the bar with which he controlled the wing span would, if left, find its own natural balance, like a set of oars. But I had a firm belief that, if Jim didn't hold on to something, this flying insect would be torn apart.

"Better Jim - like it better - if you hold bar." By now I was speaking through clenched teeth with the purest existential sense of my own fragile existence. I was more than content when Jim gave me the option of clearing the looming farmhouse roof and returning to my natural element. Later, when the turbulence had quietened, I went up again and, at one point, I remember even unclenching my fists. But I remained some way from being hooked.

What my friend Mark had to have was a boat. He talks about Candle, his wooden sailing boat, launched last week at Kirkcudbright, with affection. She has charmed him with her elegance and with her need. For those first days in the water, every one and a half hours he had to nurse her, pumping water till her timbers swelled tight. "Just like a pregnancy - all that expectation and uncertainty." She has also offered him the opportunity of dealing with "the elemental rather than the mundane".

I found Jim's Microlight such a visceral experience that we never got past my nerve ends to discuss what flight might mean to him. But Mark's Candle is pregnant with ready meaning. For him, it's the internal shifts she represents that count, the swell in his unconscious. The edge. We are awash with a tide-wrack of metaphors. Elegantly, Mark ties them all together. "For me, going and not knowing is the best possible combination. I love adventure." Or as Joseph Conrad put it: "A departure is always good, or at least good enough."

Already, Mark has a berth booked in Brest for some time in July and had, in fact, suggested some months ago that we carry on a discussion about our rites of passage on that voyage. "Yes," my wife had agreed. "Go!" I looked at her. Had she forgotten that I've never sailed in my puff? - never mind so close to the perilous Bay of Biscay.

I imagined competent, agile Mark consigning me to the cabin with a basin, just to stop tripping over me as he battened down the mainsail. Mercifully, I could remind my wife that I had an excuse: we'll be on the other side of the Atlantic at the time.

But I did make it to Candle's maiden voyage - from the pier to the jetty at Kirkcudbright, all of 500 yards. There were 15 of us - a scattering on deck and a posy of children poking from the hold. As Mark, tiller in hand, peered past us, ecstatic as a new father, we passed round the champagne. Definitely my kind of adventure.

I was also 50 last month. My wife has promised me a brand new bike. Each to his own. What was it Liz Lochhead said about men? "Och, all wee boys at heart." So be it. Fifty is the new 30, I'm told. Hi-ho, Silver, away!

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