Appeared in RN colours (with the fin flash markings the wrong way round!) at the Autumn Air Day the year it arrived. I’ve got some slides, but no decent slide scanner…sorry!

‘Lady in Red’ – pass the sick bag please, what a load of mediocre bilge with absolutely no redeeming features whatsoever (correct, I have little time for Debugg and his alleged ‘talent’)
As for luuurve songs, after the demise of Stiff Records, Jake Riviera and Nick Lowe were involved with F-Beat Records – Nick’s contention was that, if you couldn’t f*** to it, there was no way it was going to be a hit, surely the ultimate definition of a love song.
Personally, I prefer the darker songs…..Dark End of the Street by Dan Penn, as recorded by James Carr (and many others like Ry Cooder & Richard Thompson) has to be the ultimate song about illicit love (that is, until I saw Elvis Costello doing ‘Either Side of the Same Town’, a brilliant new song in the classic soul vein)

And I typed this before Stuart Maconie’s magnificent demolition of ‘Lady in Red’ on C4 tonight …..”a bad song, sung dreadfully, by a bloke who you would rather not have on your TV”

Shot at Hemswell by Air Commodore Cozens, reputedly the only colour film taken of Bomber Command in WW2.

I binned them all and don’t miss them. Much of the information is available (and far easier indexed) in a decent collection of books (Putnams for example, plus a decent collection of Mr. Ellis’s Wrecks & Relics). Most information you seek is probably on-line somewhere anyway.
The news sections, well, to quote Elvis C, “Yesterday’s news is tomorrows fish and chips paper” – nothing LESS topical than a 15 year old news article.
Bin/sell them, its quite cathartic!

Presumably, its Hastings T.5 TG503 (with radome removed to restore it to C.1 configuration), ex Strike Command Bombing School, Bomber Command Bombing School etc., which was preserved at Gatow.

Well done Fluffy – hope you don’t think I was being hypercritical, the BBMF is a national treasure and you all do a fantastic job…….but those roundels have irritated me ever since they appeared on the last repaint. Thanks.
I’ve just realised (from looking at the BBMF website), that P7’s current paint scheme is meant to represent L1067, so maybe, in that context, the sky fuselage band is correct. Because of P7’s 603 Sqn. history, I had always assumed the current scheme was meant to represent its actual markings in a previous life, rather than a different machine!

According ‘Spitfire Survivors’ (Riley/Trant), P7350 was with 602 Sqn. from 17-31 October 1940 (hence the XT code). The sky fuselage band was introduced from 27 November 1940, so the current scheme is probably only an approximation (unless photos exist – I’ve never seen one)