Billhook

Steve Winwood, Yeah!

Just remembered a couple of stories that father told me not long before he died. As many have said on here,people did not talk about their war and father had been no different up to the point in his old age that he decided to write down his memories. He then wanted me to put them on the computer, knowing full well that I would read them, but he still could not tell me these stories directly. When he was training doing circuits and bumps, he was going solo but under strict instruction when doing the final landing to pull off to the side and let any following aircraft land. It was a Court Martial offence to move once pulled off. This time the following aircraft lost control and the prop took away the whole tail section of father's plane. I think that as many pilots were lost due to accidents, either weather or pilot error, as to enemy action. The second story used to haunt him. He was called out in the Warwick to rescue the crew of a B17 that had ditched in the Channel. When he arrived he could see most of the crew of ten swimming near the wreckage. He was under instruction to not drop the large lifeboat too close, but he was a good judge of distance and dropped it less than fifty yards away. They circled and watched as one by one the crew slowed down until they all were floating lifeless. The combination of crash injuries, battle injuries, and the freezing cold sea all took their toll, and there was nothing that father or his crew could do to help.

My father went off to war in 1940 very much against the wishes of his father who had been seriously wounded at Arras in WW1 and had a leg amputated as a result. That was meant to be .the war to end all wars.. Father trained at Anstey with the RAF and received his Wings there and was then sent to Newfoundland, followed by Edmonton near Calgary followed by Pensacola where he trained on Catalinas under the Towers scheme. He was trained as a pilot, a navigator and a wireless operator and after a couple of years was sent back across Atlantic in 1943 in an unescorted ship with 1600 others who had been fully trained over the same period. imagine it might have changed the course of the War if that ship had been sunk by a U Boat..! He ended up at Davidstow in Cornwall in 280 Squadron on Coastal Command flying Wellingtons and later Warwicks dropping huge lifeboats and dingys to people in the Channel and Atlantic. I still have his log books, his bubble sextant and a large compass taken out of a Wellington at the end of the War. Mother was taken out of school at 17 in 1941 and joined the WRNS and was based at nearby Treligga near Port Isaac where they had a practice target field for rocket training for Typhoon pilots. The WRNS had to run out from behind a bunker and replace the target before the Typhoon came around again ( before the days of 'Elf an Safety!) They all went drinking at the King Arthur's Arms Hotel at Tintagel and that it where Ma and Pa met and they were married for 63 years. I was amazed to find not only all the records of father's operations but also photos of my mother driving an ambulance and fire tender, all at the Davidstow museum. In her last year in her nineties, she had dementia but the one story she kept repeating was the time when a B17 Fortress came around the airfield at Treligga in foggy conditions. The airstrip there was grass and only about six hundred yards long and was only meant as an emergency strip for the Hawker Typhoons to land in the event of their rockets throwing up debris and damaging the engine. The B17 circled with its wheels down and the leading officer fired a flare to warn it away, but it came in and landed quite easily being a tail dragger and a good pilot. The WRNS went out to greet it and they turned all the guns on them. They had no idea where they were and thought that they were still in France! The next day they had taken all the bombs , ammo and anything that could be taken off and lined the B17 up at the start of the runway. At Treligga there is quite a steep cliff going down to the sea. All the WRNS held their breath while the four engines roared and the machine headed off towards the cliff. It lumbered over the cliff and disappeared from sight and everyone held their breath waiting for the explosion but started to breathe again when the plane roared into sight again climbing fast! The extraordinary thing was exactly the same thing happened on the same date a year later! Jcarbor and Mike Hill talking of South Africa reminds me that my Mother's father, a Scotsman, was brought up in Bloemfontein and at the age of sixteen joined the Brand's Horse to put down the 1915 Boer rebellion there. He then went on with them to defeat the Germans in Namibia (Deutch Sud Vest). In 1916 he caught measles and was sick for most of the year so missed the carnage of the Somme but he joined the Royal Field Artillery in 1917 and went on to fight at Ypres. He had his horse shot from under him twice and gained an MC gazetted in 1918 and survived the war unscathed. Amazing I now have the time in this lock down to write all this!!

You remind me of a house not far from here which used to have a large white sort of calcareous stain down the brickwork below an upstairs window. I thought it was the remains of some old rendering but then someone told me that the bloke who lived there used to go down to the pub a lot and since they only had a downstairs loo.............

I know we run a fifteen year old Volvo XC70 , but it is bit unfair to refer to it as an old bus! She notices a spot of dirt on the kitchen worktop if I have not wiped it after using it, but she throws all sorts of rubbish on the floor of our car and never notices if I have vacuumed or washed the car!

Fair comment, but I feel slightly vindicated as my wife did not notice it for three days!

You have to really check out the web as the price for this seems to vary from under £50 to over £100. Mine was from Amazon Door Canopy 155 x 75cm Awning Gazebo 3 mm Soild Board GVH158 WWW.MANOMANO.CO.UK IN STOCK: best prices on Door Canopy 155 x 75cm Awning Gazebo 3 mm Soild... mine

It started on September 23rd and did not stop until March. I was so fed up with standing at our back door in the rain, fiddling around with the keys while the shopping and my clothing became wetter, that I bought one of these covers for about £50 from Amazon. It was quite easy to fit, not too obnoxious and lets the light in. It has not rained since I fitted it in March!

Here you are then, a good laugh for you all to help take away the pain of Lock Down! There was a lot of pressure on the gearbox which made it difficult to find reverse after a push You can see the knife start to rock . The knife plus a lump of concrete was pushed out of the ground after I turned the log around to have a go from the other end.

just found a cure for the virus that has obviously covered her bits

Another angle on all of this which certainly needs to be discussed calmly. I think that they have a point about discussion in general being shut down over contentious issues by the use of labels. So people become, xenophobe, racist, transphobe, misogynist, homophobe snd now Covidphobe so everyone just withdraws from reasonable debate.

I agree, when processing 10 inch Sycamore through the Palax it goes through the four way splitter with ease, also when I use the Fiskars X27 together with Ash it would be the log of choice.

I’d split it the other way around too (butt first) - those unions will be tough buggers. It could well have been my poor mixing, but yes the concrete was the weakest point so a bit more concrete and more steel mesh. I have a video of my attempts but it was too big to put on here, needs to go on youtube when I find a moment. I started with it butt first and there was a sign of a crack after three rammings with the D7. So I turned around to see if it was just this particular difficult joint. All the other logs put through went so easily with hardly any change in Daisy Etta's engine note. Was it because it was so recently blown over and needed to be left for a year or two? The first video was a similar Sycamore with just as many branches and no trouble at all. It had been down for a year. The log will now be taken to the Lucas Mill as a punishment and die the death of a thousands cuts into lengths of 6"x8" and then cut into 16" logs on the Palax and conveyored into a one ton wooden box and so to the log burner. What would you mill it into? I will upload to Youtube the attempts by Daisy Etta purely for the amusement of all during this lock down!

Well it was fun while it lasted The score now is Daisy Etta 1 , the static knife 1, the Sycamore Log 2 , and the concrete nil After this attempt the knife plus a large lump of concrete were pushed out of the ground . I was impressed by the Sycamore it has only just come down in the recent gales so I thought that it would be easier to split, obviously not!

Couple more positive outcomes today on my half mile cycle ride to the farm yard. No traffic at all and not one bit of litter to pick up. No cans of energy drink, Red Bull , no sandwich wrappers or McDonalds cartons,Bliss1

Balalaika!

What instrument was this written for as it only has four strings?

Young talent!

How did I forget that one! Also Arbtalk will be about ten times more active than normal. Which brings me to think of all the work Steve Bullman does to make this site so good. He is probably not having much sleep at the moment tending to the beautiful little Maddalena So thank you again Steve for all your hard work

Wondering if we can find some positive outcomes for this Lock Down. Here is my first dozen 1. Giving up smoking (not me!) 2. More attention to eating fresh food and less sugar (Me!) 3. Lose that weight you have been trying to shift for years (Me!) 4. Meeting elderly and vulnerable people from your community to help them, which you otherwise would never have met 5. Facing your family and having to resolve issues that you would normally walk away from by going to work 6. Cleaning the house 7. Tidying up your bookwork and accounts 8. Finding time to read books like Norwegian Wood 9 Hopefully the country will try and be more self sufficient for food security and have less exotic imports with no account of the conditions or procedures of their production 10 less just in time globalisation in general. 11 More people working from home via the internet 12 Start that vegetable garden "Digging for Britain!" Any more

Thinking about this a little more and also referring to another link somebody posted, I cannot see how it is possible that one and a half billion people, living in close proximity with not enough health care, could have less fatalities than Italy China's Coronavirus Coverup -- Devastating Lies | National Review WWW.NATIONALREVIEW.COM And the irreparable damage they have caused around the globe.

I have often thought of the wealth of knowledge and experience that you and the doctors I know have had. One spent time in South Africa and saw many diseases that you would never see here. I was wondering if there was a doctors site like arbtalk where you could ask a question if you were a young doctor and needed some help. Somehow the retired doctor would need to be rewarded for his advice that found the right outcome. Need Steve Bullman's brains to work that one out!

One of the three doctors is ten years older than you. He said that he thought one of the problems was medical colleges trying to be gender equal. In his day there were only a handful of women in the college with him, but now they are forced to have equal numbers. He says it is an unfair but true statistic that a large proportion of the women being trained now will leave the profession for several years to have families and maybe not return. This is a large waste of education and leads to a general shortage of doctors. Maybe a hard fact of life. Now your wife is a doctor, so I would be interested to know her thoughts on this

Just had a whatsapp from a Chinese friend of mine, she was brought up in Shandong, left for Uk in 1990s and still has many friends and family in China. She says that the Chinese government lie about everything and that the true death toll is over eight million in China