Feeling hot, hot, hot.

Local news has been going on about how hot it is – seems an old lady collapsed in the heat in her back garden and her daughter thought she’d fallen asleep and put a blanket over her! Couple of hours baking in the sun and she is now in hospital recovering.
Heard on the radio of an elderly gentleman who walked along the prom at Bournemouth in suit, shirt and tie, vest (sleeveless t-shirt-like garment worn next to the skin, for our American friends), and rain coat (in this weather!), as everyone else was running around wearing next to nothing, who collapsed and was rushed to hospital to recover. Old people!
Read in the local paper of the rich people suffering on their floating gin palaces at Cowes (Isle of Wight, big sailing week thingy) quenching their thirst with more alcohol and then being recovered to the nearest first aid post suffering from dehydration – only to go back out and repeat the experience!

The rail problem could be worse. My sister is a train driver, and at the moment she is not allowed to drive unless she signed off at her depot over 12 hours previously – and when she suddenly finds that her train terminates in South Wales and it takes her 5 hours to return to her depot to sign off then she is not legally allowed to take her 07:30 out the following morning. This causes people to moan about the lack of a train to work the following morning, etc, so they drive instead and get into traffic jams and get mad. (She gets murderous if you mention leaves on the line!)

Wish I had some time off but I just know it will be wet and windy when my holiday comes around – how was I to know? July and August in Britain can usually be classified as very mild winters!

Flood is still scratching and there are still bleddy moths circling his head.

Missing my fix!

Anyone else – non subscribers – having difficulty getting hold of this months edition? I have trekked into three different WH Smiths in the past week and none of them had a copy. At the last one I asked a dopy assistant who was stocking the shelves (with poxy celeb mags – ugh!) if there was a problem and after three minutes (or thereabouts – doesn’t time fly when you are having fun) she still hadn’t grasped the concept of someone wanting aviation/aeroplane/flying magazines – not even when I pointed to them on the shelf! :confused:
I do not subscribe to magazines by post any more; not when those post office muppets seem content to fold the mags up to fit through a standard letter box or – as happened for a while with a music mag I used to have delivered – decide that free gifts applied to them and not me.:mad: 😡 😡 At least in WH Smiths (if they have it in stock or haven’t banned it from sale because there was something about them inside that they did not like – getting Private Eye used to be a gamble) you are only competing with those who read it in the shop or the swine who leave a bogie in the centre-spread!:mad:

Hmm. Strange that the local 8‘till late can stock 20-odd top shelf porn mags but seem doubtful about the wisdom of placing a monthly order for Flypast for me – maybe, if the Utterly Butterly girls were featured a bit more often…:D 😀 😀

Flood

Ahhh, imagine a world without hypothetical situations…

Anywhere, really, but featuring all those display pilots that have gone on ahead, flying the aircraft that are also no longer with us.
Otherwise something that is now very rare – it is really great to have 3-4 of one type at a display but you can have too much of a good thing – or very exotic or extinct. I have always wondered what kind of displays the Westland Whirlwind (fixed wing, not rotary) or the DH Hornet would have given, or experienced one of those airfield attacks from the 1950s that I was always being told about by those who were old enough to be there!

Flood

Sorry to drag you all down but I can’t sleep. The thermometer I have outside on the wall says 22.5 degrees C and that’s at 02:30am BST. The fan is chucking warm air at me, the cat is moping around complaining because he’s hot too, and to cap it all my eczema has decided to make an unwelcome appearance and I can’t stop bl00dy scratching it. AAARGH! The place is swarming with moths and flies and bugs, and there is a socking great spider up in the corner but I bet he won’t catch all these creepy crawlies.

Oh sleep, why do you elude me?

Flood

Haven’t seen this one before – and it makes for interesting reading! If only I had the ability to flame and insult at the drop of a baseball cap!!! (And if only it wasn’t too hot to sleep)

Quote:-
Tibet has been apart of China for hundreds of years before the west even knew there was such a place.

Thirteen years ago there took place an invasion which was apparently justified to the world by very similar rhetoric.
And another happened twenty one years ago – and El Generalissimo made the same sort of noises to his people.

Now I happen to know that one mans terrorist is another mans freedom fighter, and the definition will always remain blurred unless one side happens to be USA friendly – which is probably why we have heard so little about what is actually happening in Tibet. 🙁 I don’t have any hard information to hand but did come across one of those unfortunates ranting in the street who was decrying the fate of poor, poor Tibet. I know that such people should be locked up for telling such lies but when mad fools shout to passers-by about the rape and murder of Tibetans by glorious Chinese soldiers the people will start to wonder. The American police had the right idea when they broke up anti-Gulf war protests in cities across the states by force – and I don’t believe the rumour that one loony died as a result of trying to deflect a baton charge with their head – as I am sure the Chinese authorities would do the same too, and I also believe that they both would successfully keep such disgraceful behaviour by the plebeians out of the supportive press – much as the cowardly Tibetans have received no coverage of their gutless campaign against their natural rulers.
Mnngar (takes tongue out of cheek!) 😀 😀 😀
There have been Tibetan terrorists (coz that is what they would be to both the Chinese and Americans, these days 🙁 ); I read a year or two ago a report by a photographer who trekked with a resistance fighter and watched the destruction of an army truck after an attack on a logging camp. That is possibly the major problem to the fiscally minded – the fact that China can’t practice deforestation on a large scale because they have problems protecting the lumberjacks… And with the wimpy commie-lovin’ greens moaning about protecting endangered hard wood forests where do you think the next load could be coming from?
Um, anyway. :confused:
Rome held control of large parts of Europe for hundreds of years – I welcome the sight of the Italian army trying to enforce that one!!! 😀 😀 😀

Feeling tired. Need sleep.

Flood retires to his lead-lined bunker, resolving to keep his head down for a while.

Been there.
Done that.
Fantastic.
The memory – it was just two, but still brilliant – stays close to my heart even though the following morning there were so many nutters there, just in case, that one prat bust my arm and broke both our boards trying to surf with his head screwed round the other way.

Wish I was back in Newquay now – coz I can’t afford Hawaii!

Rated 18
The clip is currently on the It’s All about Warfare World War II – Air War Forum:-

http://pub131.ezboard.com/fallboutwarfarefrm31.showMessage?topicID=3117.topic

I still think it is lower than I’d want to see a Spit but it does make for fascinating viewing – as long as nobody gets hurt.

Flood

Doughnut suggested that Duxford should not receive a Concorde because they do not take care of the aircraft they have got, and I can see where he is coming from. Dunno whether I agree with it, but…

Duxford has scrapped aircraft before (and in the shape of the VT-29B an aircraft which will almost certainly never be seen this side of the Atlantic again, whatever local history it had). I would hate for them to now decide that their core business is to get people to come and have a stare at the Concordes (”The only pair in captivity!” tm) at the expense of the ‘duller’ exhibits – or even that they should get a roller coaster or bouncy castle for the kiddies.
As has been mentioned previously the Shackleton probably would have faded from memory had it not been for the fact that it plodded on long after it should have been retired. My mother could tell the difference between the BBMF Lanc and a Shackleton – don’t ask me why; maybe that big dome on the underside made it look cute but that’s really something from a most unaviation minded woman who usually can identify only big ‘planes, little ‘planes, Chinooks and helicopters – when we were on holiday under a flight path in the 70s or 80s. She went on remembering them when they appeared on TV during the Nimrod AEW debacle, when WR965 crashed, and when they were finally phased out of service for a fleet of Seattle coffee tables she remembered them (“Real airplanes, dear, from my era!”). Whilst there are people like her alive who remember this type who are we to decide it is irrelevant and worthy only of scrapping?
The Shackleton will be a great loss if/when it is broken up/sectioned; it will be another nail in the coffin of the types (complete airframe) extinction. Yes there are other Shackletons around but if you had asked me 10-15years ago whether I would put money on a large 4 engined aircraft from either the IWM Duxford or The Bide-A-Wee Home For Retired And Geriatric Airframes being threatened with Mr JC Bamford’s finest then it looks like I would have lost the bet. It does beg the question are the other Shacks in good order and do they look set for what looks like some sort of sad endurance race (last one to survive wins?).

That said I used to enjoy clambering through aircraft when I was younger – like the Halifax in IWM Lambeth – so maybe another generation will get some pleasure from its corpse, but it is still sad.

Flood

(Guaranteed free of additives, GM, and Janie!)