Broithe

OMG! You were lucky to get out alive, if the locals had seen you misspell Moreton-in-Marsh... I presume it was a source for Much Binding in the Marsh and the antics of Kenneth Horne and Dickie Murdoch. Did you get to drive on the M96 motorway? Few people have.

A friend of mine was an odd character - generally OK, but when he got out-of-hand, things would escalate very quickly - he was generally known as Nightmare Neil. He had, though, the benefit of the fact that English coppers generally have little knowledge of the general local population, apart from their own circles and a few habitual criminals. This meant that Neil, who also had a capacity to look totally innocent, no matter what he had just done, was often taken home in a cop car, as the chance of him interacting with one who had dealt with him before was practically zero. This led to us referring to them as his Blue and Yellow Taxis. He also had a magical accuracy with a snowball - no power, but he would always hit you - he would stare at you with glazed eyes and, as soon as you decided to move, the snowball would appear at your new location and hit you in the face.

That's their prerogative. Maybe they've said too much already..?

The Germans actually recorded different targets from the RAF's intentions on several occasions. Flying round in the dark without GPS, or even any inertial systems, hardly bears thinking about. Half the time you probably wouldn't even have the stars... Airspeed, which way you're pointing, what time it is and a good guess at what the wind might be doing where you were, was the basis of where you might be at the time. Now and then you might see a bit of a river, or something else that might be recognisable. Once you started evasive tactics, you could easily drift off to one side, unless you kept a careful count of what was going on. Things got better with the various 'beam' systems, but you could still get confused... I once got lost, on foot, in daylight, in the fog, in a field that I (thought I) had a reasonable knowledge of...

We may wait a while before this is available RTR.

It was a similar arrangement to the Fairey Firefly that preceded it. Gannets were very big things, hence the bi-folding wings. Someone bust the outer panels off one, pulling out from a simulated attack, but still managed to land it 'safely'. Not everybody else was so lucky with wing failures. He may have landed it ashore, though - somewhere, there is the obligatory picture of the driver pointing at the damage, as if you might not have noticed. The Double Mamba engine was another weirdness - essentially two separate engines. It was common practice to just run one for doodling around, swapping to the other occasionally, to keep the running hours similar.

My personal experience of 'Royal' Mail tracking is that it is largely fictional, based on rather optimistic guesswork.

My tame mole in Network Rail says - "They're track datum plates to show the cant angle, offset from platform, radius of track, etc. If they get the dimensions right you don't have to "mind the gap"

It's a Threshold Infestation Monitor - if there's teeth marks in it, you need a bigger cat. Reminiscent of the loss of Avro Shackleton WR986 - written off in Malta due to a rat infestation that destroyed the wiring and control cables.

That's just not at all fair. They were behind the yellow line.

The red square does look remarkably like a rodenticide block, but it seems an odd place to put one.

I'm going to be reluctant to record my progress, or lack of it, on this project, due to the Forum's ban on religious discussions.

The ICE made representations about it over several years and, as nobody ever included themselves in the 'Boring' category, however specialised they were in mining, tunnelling or well-drilling, it was eventually abandoned.

An interesting cameo scene...

Whilst advertising does pay for a lot of stuff I use 'free', it remains, mostly, a mystery to me. An experiment you can try is to wait until an ad break on the telly has finished and then ask someone what the adverts were for. Quite often, people have little actual memory of what has just been presented to them. Most of the 'targeted' adverts that I get online are sheer madness - I feel sure that just doing it randomly would be better, there might be the odd one of interest then. Over a period of many months, I was subjected to repeated adverts for a book which promised to help me "Become a Complete Christian Woman" - this seemed quite an ambitious project - but, if this weather continues, then I might make a start... Whilst it does pay for some sites that would otherwise need to be funded in some other way, it can, as with some newspapers, etc., become a problem which simply results in the adverts getting fewer views than if they were less intrusive. At one time, I made quite a niche product which was sold locally, pretty much by word-of-mouth and one example in a small shop window - a typical 'cottage industry' scenario. Somebody suggested that I should advertise in the local paper, pre-internet days). I did, and was absolutely inundated with enquiries, to the point that I could do little else than just answer them for a fortnight. These enquiries came in two forms - people who thought they wanted one, but were never actually going to buy one - and people* wanting details to pass on to my competitor about how I made a better one that was cheaper than his. I sold not a single one as a result of that advert. * It was in the very early days of the 1471 caller identity system and I was able to determine that the calls came from his brother's phone...

This.

UK Financial Times.

Stradbally photo on the front page of today's Irish Times.

I have seen this elsewhere on the grapevine. "I am very sorry to have to tell you that Russan Limited, trading as Eileens Emporium has ceased trading and appointed liquidators. We have done our best to send out all the stock we have for pre-paid orders. I am sorry that we were not able to complete all of them. Any claims against the business should be sent to: Christine Vaines, Begbies Traynor, Suite C 11 Kingsmead Square, Bath, BA1 2AB | T: 01225 316 040 | Email Christine.Vaines@btguk.com"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hodson_baronets The mention of 'Houghton' should, almost certainly, be 'Haughton'.

Possibly both? For many years into the 1980s, the UK's Yellow Pages had a 'Boring' section, which was empty, but had a handy suggestion of where else you might look for boring people. Somewhere, I may still have the framed cutting that I had above my desk. Oh, how we mechanical engineers used to laugh about it, whenever there were any stone age chaps to hear us...

This has the potential to be annoying - a high-speed sleeper? It'll probably stop half-way through an episode and continue on a bus, with no heating...

Dare we hope..?