THE LAST time (all right, the only time) I flew on Concorde was about six or seven years ago, on a press trip to witness the launch of an Ariane rockets at Kourou in French Guyana. Everything went according to plan and there were no mishaps.

I was upset therefore when the most recent Ariane rocket exploded in the sky above Kourou earlier this month. My upset was purely emotional all right, it was a bigger "story" than occurred on my visit, but we media folk are not all in thrall to hot news and shock journalism.

I myself was content during my stay in Kourou to file a low key report to my newspaper along the lines that everything had gone well, the hotel was reasonably comfortable, Concorde was a very fine aeroplane (if daringly fast), the people at Arianespace were kindness itself, press facilities were excellent and the sun was shining brightly, though the rocket went up on an overcast night and we actually saw very little.

I did not even bother to argue with Gaughan, my editor, when he phoned back to say my story was "not exactly page one material". He also quiered with unnecessary sarcasm my description of the rocket as being "propelled upwards": was I concerned that readers might otherwise surmise it was propelled in a different direction? Sideways? At an angle of 300? Perhaps even downwards?

I ignored all this I am used to the man but took mild exception to having my piece described as being "as dull as bloody dish water". What was I supposed to do, I remember remonstrating calmly (after drawing attention to his own use of cliche) sabotage the rocket? Describe one colleague's embarrassing attempt on the outward trip from Paris to enrol an extremely giggly hostess into something he called the Ten Mile High Club?

"Why not?" was Gaughan's crude response. It has to beat a dumb rocket propelled upwards on a dark night." I though not. No, thank you.

My story was subsequently cut to three paragraphs on page 24, crushed between Upcoming Auctions and Legal Vacancies: a decision I thought reflected much more poorly on my superior and the newspaper than it did on me.

Meanwhile our little group enjoyed the simple charms of Kourou, a drab place but with a certain desolate charm, and a few thousand respectful natives living happily on next to nothing. We spent one glorious afternoon swimming in a natural lagoon off Devil's Island, and as I dog paddled in the crystal clear water, my thoughts were on poor Dreyfus and how cruelly he must have suffered for all those years.

Bennett of the Mail asked rather oddly how a competent actor could be treated so unfairly. "I thought Lost in Yonkers was a fine film", he said to me.

Later we enjoyed a poolside buffet and some quite exotic local entertainment, and as the trip drew to an end we still had the enchanting prospect of the return stop over in Paris, where I knew a major Symbolist exhibition had just opened. Some of my colleagues, however, seemed more interested in the dull refuelling stop in Dakar, where we would not even see the Senegalese capital, and would merely be cooling our heels for an hour in the airport VIP bar.

Anyway. After the recent Ariane disaster, The Irish Times pointed out that mythology is filled with gloomy warnings to mankind not to press on too fast: "Ariadne herself, after whom the rocket was named, had a moment of glory rescuing Theseus from the Minotaur, but then came to a sticky end."

This is a bit unfair. Ariadne, a rather attractive brunette and former vegetation goddess, was not in it for the glory, though of course it was she who provided Theseus with the sword to kill the Minotaur and the thread with which to find his way back out of the labyrinth, which was very poorly signposted.

As for the "sticky end", it is true that Ariadne was abandoned in Naxos by Theseus, whose proposed attendance at a masculinity weekend over on Symi caused a huge row between the pair of them. But Ariadne still managed to fall on her pretty little feet: she was taken up by no less a figure than Bacchus, who made an honest woman of her, and gave her a crown which after her death became the celestial constellation still known to astronomers by the name of Ariadne.

That was not a bad fate for an ordinary middle class Greek girl. She had good friends, of course - Dona Ferentes and Timmy O'Danaos stood by her through thick and thin - and an interesting life. Few of us could ask for more. {CORRECTION} 96062500047