NOT one for scrupulously remembering the birthday of every close relative, I excelled myself this year by not only marking my wife's 60th but also organising a hot-air balloon flight for her.

I've written so many news stories on the 'granny does parachute jump at 90' theme that I've long realised how much new experiences can give the over-50s a boost as effective as Sanatogen (allegedly).

The thrill started much earlier than the morning of the flight because I had to use my O-level French to arrange it over the phone and by e-mail with a company in Provence whose answer to the question 'Vous parlez Anglais?' was a de Gaulle-ish 'Non'.

My wife's birthday is in August, when we are more often than not on holiday, so celebrations and the bestowing of gifts have to be secretive. I once fretted over the possibility that an airport checker might regard a brooch in my holdall as a weapon to be held at the pilot's throat while I demanded from Tony Blair an increase in the state pension on pain of a hi-jack to Swaziland.

The balloon flight was a secret until about five days before lift-off, when my brother and sister-in-law were helping the two of us arrange an itinerary for our first week. We couldn't possibly say we'd deal with August 20 when we came to it, so the truth made its cat's exit from the bag.

I'd rashly booked a dawn flight over the Luberon hills, which meant setting out at 5.30am along deserted and unlit country roads for a 20-kilometre journey. What's more, the weather began oscillating between raincloud and mist.

For a moment, there came one of those intimations of mortality to which we of a certain age are particularly prone, akin to boarding an Alicante-bound Boeing 747 the day after one has plunged into a Brazilian rainforest. You know it couldn't possibly happen two days running. Could it?

My sister, who was also with us for a few days, asked if we'd read the opening chapter (at least) of Ian McEwan's novel Enduring Love, which graphically depicts a ballooning accident as tragic as anything in Greek drama. We had.

I began wondering why the dragon's tongue of flame that licks into the inside of the balloon to create its hot air never sets the whole caboosh alight and sends its basketload of passengers hurtling through the air, each clinging helplessly to a piece of smouldering, multicoloured canvas.

We worry about such things not necessarily because they are frightening but because, having reached middle-age unscathed, we demand more life rather than sermons about our having had a 'good innings', as though living were something we should be prepared to give up so that others can have a go at it.

Those first few seconds as you float above the trees are almost as indescribable as eventually riding a snowscape of cloud under a blue sky and with an all-round view of sunlit mountain tops.

The activity below was also fascinating - people treading grapes, force-feeding geese, shooting skylarks and driving wartime Renault vans from the back of which melons fell regularly like dambusting bombs.

Sorry - I jest. But there is nothing frivolous about the 'Certificat de Vol en Montgolfiere', which we each received after our trip. It qualifies us forgetful boys to fly a balloon anywhere at any time as long as we wear goggles, a leather skull-cap and a long, white, silk scarf.

Useful if we miss a birthday and need a quick and quirky gift idea.