You may be interested to know about this. Peaodaphilia seems to have developed as a new thing, but it isn’t. Back in the late 50’s and 60’s the area where we lived, on the edge of the city was rife with odd blokes attempting to obtain sexual favours from us kids, using blackmail. We were actually pretty wise and fought back. My mate and I had a large dog which we trained to attack these scum, of course we never told our parents as they would never have let us play out in the woods.
A great incident, now bearing in mind we were only about 12 at the time, my mate and I spotted a suspicious looking character lurking on our railway bridge, he dissapeared into the woods so we followed him, at a safe distance of course, and we knew all the secret paths so he had no chance.
We came across some quite young kids in a clearing and asked if anything had happened, yes, said this little kid who was about 6, ‘he got his willy out’
what did you do, I fired my catapult straight into his B######, he ran.
So we followed him.
We caught him hiding behind a bush watching a young couple snogging, we warned them and he turned on us and produced a mallet from under his coat, the dog did the rest and locked his jaws round the b###### wrist, he then legged it down the canal. Oh joy, a group of Teddy Boys were coming the other way firing indiscrimently into the canal with airguns, ‘Whats up Boys’.
‘That mans a perv trying to assault little kids’
He was last seen running down the bank, trousers down his ankles being peppared with airgun pellets and persude by some really nasty looking guys, I presume he’s now under a landfill site.
Never saw him again.
Signing off for a while now as I’m moving house, merry Xmas.

Same Spifire came very low and fast over my front garden at about 2:00, heading south, it looked like a Mk 5 or 9, if I hadn’t been on the phone to my mother I probably could have got the letters, it was that low. My missus saw it south of Braintree, and my mother could hear it on the other end of the phone, depite our 20mm double glazing.
Sad to think that after 20 years of living in Finchingfield, that will probably be my last sighting of a warbird here before I move to Bocking on Tuesday, rather apt I thought.
I used to live at High Garrett which is just a mile up the road from where I’m moving to, the most incredable sight I saw up there was on a bright summers day while I was cutting the front lawn, I heard a noise and looked up to see 2 F-111’s, flying very close at about 200ft, following the course of the Halstead Road, a most unusual event.
This could be my last post from our fair village, I’ll have to wrestle with changing my particulars, I could be off line for a while as we intend to buy a tasty new computer when we move so it might not be worth putting this one back together, Merry Xmas everyone and think of me lugging those boxes about all day, not very easy when you’re feeling crap with a kidney infection.

That’s interesting, my old man used to play the Trombone, something he learnt to do with the Boys Brigade during the 30’s. He played in a brass band at the Crystal Palace the night before it burnt down, then on joining the army in 1940 they formed a Glen Miller type band with the Royal Artillery.
He used to go to his bedroom every Sunday morning during the 50’s and practice for an hour, then he gave it up, the trombone got passed on to a local youth with learnig difficulties in the 70’s, it was a Boosey and Hawks and must have been worth a fortune.
Our parents were creatures of habit, every Saturday morning my father took my brother and I on the bus into Nottingham, it was always the 9;30 bus, Midland General, either the E1 or B2 whichever got there first.
On being dropped off next to the Carlton Cinema we would head for the Pork Farms shop on Parliament Street where the bacon, pork pies and pork scratchings would be purchased, next along the road to the wall overlooking Victoria Station where we would scoff the scratchings and do a bit of trainspotting. Next to the Central Market where we go to the Meccano/Hornby kiosk and see what was new, then the fish market where plates of whelks would be consumed. Sneinton market if something cheap was required, Gee Dees and Beecrofts model shops, Victoria art gallery then a bit of time on the steps at Weekday Cross watching the trains, followed by a trip to Woolies and back to Mount Street bus station.
If we were lucky we would get back in time to go out on the tandem ride to Stanton Gate station followed by a drink at the Stanhope Arms.
Every other week we were forced to go to the Regent hair salon for our short back and sides, all the blokes who worked there were ancient and we had pet names for them, The Boss, Sweaty Feet, Hunchback, The Pole and worst of all and to be avoided at all costs, The Queer, they were all lovely blokes really, we just hated going there.

Thats all for now.

Living in East Anglia, we are getting blanket coverage of this on our local news bulletins, presumably the killer is watching all this and taking great delight out of it, not just him, is some sad git going to do a ‘Jack the Ripper’ tape and try to screw up the police investigations.
I live quite a way from Ipswich but who knows where the b##### lives, my missus goes up to her lonely remote stables every night in the dark to get her horses in, last night I insisted on going with her, mind you, if he tried to tangle with her I’d probably find him hanging from the village Xmas tree with bits missing off him, bless.

Just to get back on thread, what sort of powerplant does this ‘FW-190’ have and how does its performance relate to the real thing, I remember the scale replica pottering about the skies in the 80’s having no chance whatsoever in the dog fights against Ray Hannah and Stephen Grey during the set pieces at North Weald and West Malling.
Perhaps if wer’e lucky this replica and the real thing being restored in Norfolk will test their abilities against each other at, dare I say it, Leg………..ends.

Further Observations.
Life in the 50’s was interesting, my mother and father were not well off, but we never seemed to lack for anything. We couldn’t afford a car and the old man used to cycle to work every day to Blacks printworks in Nottingham where he was a compositor, that was a round trip of 8 miles every day, he must have been fit. My mother got a cleaning job at a local school and also used to cycle to work. Life was very routine and organised, but not unpleasant.
Mother would get up every morning at 6:00 as she had to be at the school for 7:00, the old man would get up shortly after and bring my brother and I a cup of tea in bed every morning, on Tuesdays and Thursdays the comics would come through the door and we would sit in bed and read those till we heard him go off to work on his bike then we would get up and do ourselves some breakfast, my brother had a long trip to school, he had to catch the Midland General bus into Nottingham then a trolleybus to school, I don’t know how he managed it.
Just before I had to go to school my mother would arrive to check I was decently dressed, yes, we were very independant.
When I was at infant school I was supposed to go and stay with a neighbour till mother got home, but I hated going round there, their dog was a pain for a start, so I had my own key and went home, would anyone allow this now.
I would get home, put on the telly and my mother would have left a snack for me to warm up, black pudding was my favourite, I used to have it on toast which I did myself, even at the tender age of 7.
My brother would get back from school about half an hour after I did, he must have hijacked the trolleybus, then the old man at about 5:30 and mother just after 6 when she had to cook tea, but not on Fridays, that was steak day and I used to start the ball rolling carried on by the others till mother got home and she could put her feet up.
My old man bought a telly for the Coronation in 1953, he always reckoned it would be a good educational tool for us, one thing we never had till my brother bought a Dansette in the early 60’s was a record player.
The telly was a gem and when ITV came out in 56 he had this wierd tuning device put on the side, what a pain that was, I could never get it right and had to desperately wait for him to come home so he could tune it into Popeye cartoons for me on a Monday night.
More later, or are you all bored.

Agreed.

Superb television and seemed to present a very accurate and emotive picture of day-to-day life in wartime Britain away from the SE and the major cities.

I found the happy ending with the son a bit of a cop-out. But otherwise, excellent.

Moggy

Apparently, the son is still a sculptor in Australia and has a very good web site that I haven’t tried to find, but it was all based on a true story and it’s presentation made it very beleivable and not contrived.
Only one grouse, the railway scenes were filmed at Keighley, why they had to use 80005, a locomotive designed and built several years after the war is beyond me when more historic locos were available, but they always do this for steam engine scenes, it winds me up.
My best mates live in a house overlooking the station, our telephone conversations are normally interspersd with hard working steam engines, and they watched the filming, even the scene in the carriage with the drunken doctor was filmed in Keighley station at night.
I also suspect that the double decker bus was actually from Bradford and not Barrow, my mates seem to think that these sequences were filmed at the Keighley bus museum.
Keighley has been used for some fantastic scenes in films over the past few years, I think that the most stunning was in ‘Yanks’, a film I haven’t seen for many years, even so, they still managed to get one of the locos wrong in that awesome final scene, my missus thinks that I ought to apply for a job as steam loco advisor for TV and film companies, it don’t cost much to get it right.
Perhaps we should start a thread on totally wrong railway scenes in films, it’s one of my pet hates.