How a balloon flight over the Pyrenees cured my mother’s fear of flying

What, for her 77th birthday, do you give a woman who has everything? I do not mean that my mother is rich or lives in luxury, but that though we, her six children, have all our lives been the recipients of birthday gifts lovingly chosen by her – she never fails to think of something useful or touching – it has never been easy to think, when her own birthday comes around, of what you can give someone who has all the possessions she wants.

She and my father live in a house they love in the Catalan Pyrenees. They are comfortably off. My mother is only fitfully interested in clothes, does not wear hats and has never carried a handbag. She loves books, but her taste is particular, and though last year I knew that Claire Tomalin’s biography of Pepys, The Unequalled Self, would be a successful present, no book came obviously to mind this year.