I can understand that pork scratchings contain all the necessary nutrients for a balanced balloon diet (got to have something to get it back down), but ginger nuts ? What's good in those ?

Better to have brought cashews, in my opinion. Try it next time with cashews, and I'm sure you'll go farther.

The competition and the expression derive from the same guy - see

http://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/gordon-bennett.html

Also, maybe we need another entry in El Reg's english dictionary for ginger nuts - for Brits, that's a kind of biscuit.

Quote from the pilot's blog: "This basket is cramped. It's four ft by four ft, smaller than the size of most people's dining rooms"

This suggests there are sub 4' x 4' dining rooms out there. Anybody seen one? Maybe he meant to say dining tables. I don't think he's getting much sleep up there...

"while surviving on a typically British diet of pork scratchings and ginger nuts"

Over the course of x days, one assumes that the pork scratchings and ginger nuts have to be expelled. Glad I'm not standing anywhere under his line of flight.