I'll be back...

Well tomorrow we are off to the Highlands for a week in our motorhome which we call Ajax (because it's so big).  We are venturing into midge country so we leave fully prepared with a large bottle of Avon's Skin so Soft, which Mel Gibson found so effective in repelling midges during the filming of Braveheart and did so much to popularise.  So here goes!


Hopefully like the Terminator "I'll be back".

On the Buses...

Since becoming a “Senior Citizen” I have made much use of my free bus pass. This is a really good perk of getting old – one of the few, I think, but I have forgotten the rest. I mainly use it to do the Stirling Park & Ride and to catch the Citylink intercity bus to either Edinburgh or Glasgow.


As buses go the Citylink buses, Plaxton Panthers, are a serious piece of kit. Based on a Vovo B12 chassis they have a 12 litre 6 cylinder turbo diesel engine and with 420 hp and 2000 Nm of torque they are no slouches, and they are quite comfortable to boot.


Generally I hate diesel engines but these are not little weedy car engines but proper diesels suitable for the 3Bs which are the only terrestrial applications for these oilburners: namely buses, bulldozers and main battle tanks.


Today I went down to Glasgow to lunch with a friend and I was struck by the fact that nearly all the passengers don’t wear seat belts! I bet they think it’s not cool if they’re young or inconvenient if they’re old. I think it’s utterly stupid. I have no intention of goung through a bus windscreen like a cannon ball. When a seat belt is provided it’s only sensible to wear it!

Caribou - peerless

Of all the aircraft that I have flown in, and that's over 70 types,  I think my fave is the DHC-4 Caribou, a transport aircraft with extraordinary short field performance.  Used now only by the Royal Australian Air Force the Caribou is the original "steam-powered" aeroplane. It has two petrol-powered radial engines and has been going strong in the RAAF since the mid 60s.  Sadly it now has to be replaced because in aeroplane terms it is very old.  But, unfortunately for Australia, there is no other aircraft in the world that can do what the Caribou can.  See for yourself


So it's bye, bye, 'bou,'bou - you will be sorely missed.

When the War is Over...

Australia is doing its best to tidy up all the loose ends of the Vietnam War which still exercise and distress people.  The remains of the crew of a Canberra bomber shot down near the Laotian border (but in Vietnam) 39 years ago have been located and are to be repatriated back to Australia.


But there are still some frayed ends: for example the civilian medical staff who served in field hospitals etc. alongside their enlisted mates but have never been classified as war veterans and so are not entitled to receive benefits.  I hope that their case is successful and that the Aussie spirit of a fair go prevails.

Back to the Future by Train

The Government appears at last to have made a decision about a high speed rail link between London and Scotland, something everyone has wanted for ages.  Having regularly travelled between Edinburgh and King's Cross each fortnight for two years there ain't much fun in commuting by train for over 4 hours, even in 1st Class.  So this is very good news indeed.


Now the Government needs to make it happen including getting some modern really fast trains.  If it does what is promised (Edinburgh to London in just over 2 hours) no-one will want to engage in that horrible sapping pastime called air travel EDI-LHR (and me an aviation enthusiast - shows you how bad it is!).

A Moan About Scotland

Thought I would start the day by having a moan about Scotland.  No not the SNP, Scottish intransigence, bagpipes or midges (more of them in a later post) but rather that perennial - The Scottish Weather !

Woke up this morning to rain and more rain and the prospect of even more rain in the next week.  This is the wettest Summer I can remember in Central Scotland.  No Global Warming here, we have Global Wetting.  It's dismal raining grey skies most of the time it seems.  Must be the only country where you get SAD (Seasonal Affective Disorder) in Summer!

BOAC Flying Boats - not always British

The Beeb has posted a set of pictures about airline travel with some quite interesting ones including a flying boat at Lagos, interesting because it’s a Boeing 314 Clipper, still in wartime livery, not a type one normally associates with BOAC. I guess they were used because the more usual ones, Solents and Sandringhams didn’t have enough range to get to Nigeria across the Sahara and had to stop at Gibraltar, Freetown and Accra.

Whilst I revere the Sunderland (from which the Sandringham sprang) I have always had a soft spot for the Clipper and it's 3,500 mile range.

Ahhh...Venice

My daughter is staying with me, just back from a year in Vienna. She described her trip to Venice this Spring and it brought back wonderful memories of my trip to Venice last year. Venice is truly a magic city and a photographers dream with stunning light and visual complexity. This is one of my favourite shots of Piazza San Marco in the late afternoon on a greyish day. The architecture is as always - brilliant - and provides a frame for the mundaneness of life as the tourists, hawkers and stall owners intermingle on perhaps the most famous urban space on Earth:

Beautiful Car

As you can see from my profile I love classic Italian sports cars. None more beautiful than the Ferrari 225S Vignale Spyder of 1952. I guess one would cost me more than £1m.

Chinook..chocks away?

Well here it goes for real. Could not believe it when I read this morning that the reason the SF Chinooks are grounded is ultimately because the MoD thought that they could write better software for the CH-47F than Boeing could despite being warned by Boeing that it would not work. So many years later and millions of Pounds of taxpayers' money we have 8 bog-standard Chinooks with no capability, no armour and unable to fly when it's cloudy. But we knew all this. What we didn't know until today is the excruciating hubris of the MoD in thinking they could do it better than Boeing! Latest in a long line of cock-ups that are costing lives. Some years ago the Met were found to be "institutionally rascist". We should raise a new category called "institutionally incompetent" to describe the MoD.

Although the dead hand of Treasury is clearly implicated in this fiasco the MoD needs a root and branch overhaul to enable our troops to get the right kit at the right time.

My First Post

This is my first post of my new blog. I am going to write about all the things that interest me so if you don't like any of them look away now.