Brilliant photos! I would love to see this aircraft. It’s a pity it won’t be back in MAN on 1-2 September!

I remember one reincarnation case I read about was a little girl in Yorkshire who “remembered” having another family in Victorian days. She could name the family and when the census was checked in the library (this was before they went online) the family she talked about was there, and she took her mother to the house where she said this family lived, and the address matched the one on the census. This girl was too young to have looked through and read the census returns.

Another one I read about cncerned a toddler who could “remember” being on the train which was involved in the Tay Bridge accident – she suddenly started talking about Dundee and being on the train which fell into the water, despite the fact that she had never been away from Newcastle in her short life!

As I said, these are things which can not be easily explained or disproved.

My own death is something that I honestly never think about – so I can’t say that I’m afraid of it or not.

I believe in reincarnation as well, not as part of any religious belief, but because I have read some interesting and difficult to disprove cases of children who say they have lived before.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/The-Children-That-Time-Forgot/dp/1482086670 This is a particularly readable book for those interested in reading more about reincarnation.

We have one widescreen TV. We watch the news at 6pm on BBC1, then local news at 6:30 on BBC1 then the TV is taken off until after 9pm – then we watch something from our DVD collection. We don’t watch any of the commercial channels because ther advert breaks are too frequent and too long. We don’t watch “talent” shows, reality shows, game shows, soaps, cooking competitions or sport.

I have a varied DVD collection – ‘Thunderbirds’, ‘Flambards’, ‘Cadfael’, ‘Dallas’, ‘Wish me Luck’, ‘Fawlty Towers’, ‘Father Ted’, ‘Keeping Up Appearances’, ‘River Cottage’, ‘London’s Burning’, ‘Walk on the Wild Side’, ‘Walking with Monsters’, ‘Walking with Dinosaurs’, ‘Walking with Beasts’, ‘Life of Birds’, various war documentaries, a few films and my most beloved series of them all ‘Secret Army’. We don’t need to watch the worthless rubbish screened on TV when we have such good programmes on DVD, things which are not repeated on TV any more.

Murder should be treated the same, whoever the victim. The sentence should either be life with no parole or (better and cheaper in the long run) it should be death, once there is absolutely no doubt at all as to guilt.

Brady, Sutcliffe, Philpott, Nielsen, Huntley and their kind would be the first to go.

There is to my mind another influence – a very pronounced influence, on the interests of children especially boys. State primary schools are almost exclusively staffed by female teachers. Being female, their recreational teaching preoccupations are with ‘soft’ subjects such as needlework, cooking, knitting, skipping and group sporting activities such as rounders, netball and the like.

What these teachers won’t be doing is encouraging young boys in what should be their natural preoccupations such as using a bag of tools and their imaginations to make things like crude aeroplanes, sledges, wheeled wooden carts, sail boats, all of which were commonplace when I was a boy. As a consequence I had – in keeping with my friends, a ready facility with tools of most descriptions and as I grew up could translate that into necessary DIY aound my house.

Instead of all that, I get an impression that the boys are included in the ‘soft’ activities of the girls. I don’t think that that is very good for the boys and their advancement into adulthood when they will be expected to provide the nation’s workforce to get their hands dirty in doing all the jobs that are so necessary to every day life and the very ones that the girls by natural inclination shy away from.

My wife and I were driving into Chichester yesterday and we passed a large expanse of ‘green’ on our left side. Children, in their whites were playing cricket and my wife pointed out the presence of girls in mixed teams with the boys. Having played the game for umpteen numbers of years, I know that cricket is not that robust a game requiring physicality in the way that rugby does. However, boys and girls play games in very different ways. I write that having witnessed many displays of feminine brutality in hockey and lacrosse. My mind wandered to the possibility that boys playing in mixed teams may well – even unconsciously – modify their natural sporting aggression with potentially dire effect on our international efforts.

The explanation that lies behind most of the above is the insane and muddleheaded preoccupation with equal opportunities that demands that the sexes are treated equally in all respects and makes no allowance for the permanent and natural differences between the genders.

I assure you that there are some girls who detest “soft” subjects such as needlework, knitting, netball etc. I can assure you that some girls would rather make model aircraft, learn how to fix things and use tools instead of doing boring “girly” rubbish we are all supposed to be into. I can assure you that some girls are more interested in science, technology and aviation and such things are not, and should not, be solely regarded as “male interests”.

The main difference between the sexes is that males are stronger than females, but as far as aptitude and intelligence and scientific ability go, it is insulting to be continually told that being female means you cannot grasp scientific ideas or are not capable of changing a fuse or rewiring a plug!! I have met some men who should not be allowed within 100 miles of anything technical yet people assume that men will always be good at such things – that is a load of crap as much as it is a load of crap to say that women will not be any good at technical things just because they happen to be female.

What I had for Sunday dinner today:

Roast belly pork (with some perfect, crispy crackling – very important part of a pork dinner!)
Stuffing (think it was sage and red onion)
Yorkshire pudding (obligatory part of Sunday dinner!)
Mash potato (with butter and milk in)
Brocolli.
Roast potato.

Tomorrow’s dinner will be similar but without the Yorkshire pudding and the brocolli will be mixed in with peas.

He was obviously bad, he would probably have done that if he’d been working. No one should start demonising everyone who is unfortunate enough to have to claim benefits because of the actions of one individual. I am on Jobseekers Allowance, I wish I wasn’t but when the only jobs you can get round here are temporary ones you have no choice but to have to claim some benefits. I would never harm anyone and think those who behave like Philpott are the lowest scum.

People on benefits are the first to be demonised about how much they cost the taxpayer, but no one ever seems to think about the extortionate pay rises that MPs award themselves for very little work, or the appalling amounts they claim on expenses for things that everyone else has to buy out of their wages – all that comes out of the taxpayer but people are always silent about that.