Ops-Normal.org

Rossian wrote: ↑

Mon Mar 14, 2022 2:24 pm

....I'm sure that the F/L Bell came to 210 SQN at Ballykelly (late '60s-ish??). He had a photo taken from his gun?camera on his Lightning after he had done a from-below-vertical attack on a Vulcan at a very high altitude. All that was in the photo was the stbd intakes v v close as he passed it on the way up. This guy also went off to do a bit of Godbothering in the dark continent. Same chap perhaps??

The Ancient Mariner

To begin with, everything was nothing
And there was nothing to speak of and no begin with.
No, there was nothing to speak of, before there was everything.
Then (when?) all speed of light and speed of forever, balls of gas,
Bright stars falling into the suck of black holes, radiant plates,
The outward transfer of angular momentum,
Then gas accreting into galaxies, becoming a little more clustered,
Becoming worlds, becoming worlds on which something so comical,
So precise, so utterly different from the world, so lovely
As that language of ours, these words, could arise in one of them.
To speak of when and then and moments is a figure of language,
It is language addressing itself to what is not, and to what it is itself not.
Language with its simple action words, verbs: Ich mag es nicht, vas-y toi, non sum qualis eram,
Language with its ‘past’ and ‘future’ and ‘present’,
Pointing to what it doesn’t know,
I love you, now, babbling of unicorns.

om15 wrote: ↑

Thu Mar 31, 2022 10:21 am

I have just finished "Operation Pedestal" by Max Hastings, I had read other books which touched on this before and had seen information on the convoy in museums in Malta, but this book gives the full story, absolutely recommended,


I Have just downl loaded onto kindle.

At the mo re reading Eleni by Nicholas Gage; was lent a copy years ago by a friend on Amorgos and have now got my own copy on Kindle.

FD2 wrote: ↑

Fri Apr 01, 2022 6:02 pm

Fred - the strongest Bolton accent I've heard! Great entertainment when he blew up a huge old factory chimney, incredibly neatly.

My chums and I used to catch the train up from Bath and go around the Swindon works writing down the engine numbers...

I am talking about Fred Dibnah who was the after dinner speaker at a software conference where I had been invited to give a talk on something scintillating like "White Box Testing Techniques Within The Context Of The SEI Software Capability Maturity Model". Anyway my talk "went down a storm" and the young software groupie girls were showering me with their underclothes <<cut back to reality>> and a small room full of mostly male geeks politely applauded after I had finished, but things got a lot better with Fred's very amusing and interesting after dinner talk about his life as a steeplejack and later I got into conversation with him at the bar where I bought him a pint and we discussed things like Garratt engines in South Africa, the steam train graveyard outside De Aar in the Karoo, and sundry other interesting things and I bought him two more pints and then he tapped me for £20.00 to catch a taxi back to King's Cross station. When asked by one of the organisers why I had done that, I explained that "poor Fred told me that in his rush down to London that morning he had mislaid his cash card and that he was short of cash to pay the taxi fare" to which "fact" and roars of laughter it was explained to me that that Fred had been paid, in cash, well over a thousand pounds that very evening for his speech! I had to laugh at the old rogue. He died, sadly, not many months later and I never got my money back but I do remember our chat with a lot of warmth and a wry smile.

FD2 wrote: ↑

Sat Apr 02, 2022 7:38 pm

Sounds like he was a bit 'careful' with his money. You never know what's around the corner...