. . . up his perverted little hole, preferably after shoving some Bwreakshiteers and Neocons up there first.
We're better than we think we are, we're better than we know we are, but we need to make more effort, every day, especially in England.Pages
Friday, May 10, 2024
Wednesday, May 8, 2024
G is for Get Arff Moi Laaaand!
I saw this on the side of a house in the hamlet of Mapledurwell near Basingrad, earlier this evening, and there was still enough light for a decent picture, so I leapt out of the cab and took one!
He literally leaps out at you as you come round the corner of a tight little lane, but the way the building is angled, by the time you've registered him, he's gone, and you're driving up the road thinking "Did I just see that?"! Hackle and buttons say Grenadiers, and he's pretty-much life-size! And it must be the Devil's own task to keep the Virginia Creeper clear of him!Friday, May 3, 2024
L is for Last One For Now!
I know it's not everyone's cup-of-tea, but I find this stuff fascinating, and there's plenty still in the queue, both from Alderney and closer to home, but this is the final part of the recent visit to Hazeley Heath and the cable-testing station of the Royal Engineers and their antecedents.
Thursday, May 2, 2024
F is for Frog . . . Man!
It WAS a rubber jiggler, and it WAS that stretchy, silicon-rubber, clammy stuff which gets covered in pet hairs, dust and some sticky substrate/exudate, so this shot is 'after cleaning', but the bugger was huge, and I should have guessed-so from the knicker-elastic used in place of the thin black elastic thread, the giant spiders and King Kong's of my youth used to get!
See! Mahoosive lump of rubber! But, marked AAA and dated 1968, the year AAA are believed to have been set up. Previously known for their animals, a lot subcontracted to other brands, I think this is the first/earliest [part-] human figure I've seen by them, and from the colours of both polymer and paint, we can probably assume, with some safety, that they are responsible for a lot of the similar rubber-jigglers found in gum-ball capsule machines, including some of the Lik Be (LB) copies, such as those we saw here.
Wednesday, May 1, 2024
B is for Brain Fog
As I said the other day, we used to play out on the heath, all day! Mum would fill our water-bottles with orange squash, I had Dad's old Palestine one, with the tan, strappy-cage holder, and my brother had the green US Vietnam one with the two poppers at the neck (the SAS used them in the jungle), and a couple of cold sausage sandwiches, and we'd go off and play 'Army men' all day, ranging for miles and sometimes meeting other kids, sometimes having a 1000-acres to ourselves, if we avoided the Gypsy camps!
One of my childhood memories was finding a tank-testing inclined ramp, in fact, I remember two, side by side, about 30º and 40º each, but what has now been opened-up and left on display, is A) nothing like my memory, and B) somewhere else!
And while it may be that the others are somewhere else, on the more private land a few-hundred yards to the east, hidden in the undergrowth, I suspect that my memory of this (below) has become conflated with various pictures of similar ramps in tank or AFV books?
Here's one that has been pulled out, or weathered-out at some point, so you can get some idea of how deep the anchors went, it's filled with dirt now, mostly sandy, so weathered concreate running down the slope and filling any holes it finds!
This was lying in the channel where some kids probably pulled it out of the bog, or found it in the undergrowth, it's a solid chink of steel with a blunt-point at one end and might be another kind of anchor, for either the hawsers under test, or the test weights/vehicles?
Tuesday, April 30, 2024
BMSS is for British Model Soldier Show!
As I mentioned earlier, I popped-over to the BMSS (Society!) show in Reading on Saturday, for support really, I wasn't buying, and while I got there a bit late, the entry-fee was collected against future show organising, and I took a few shots of the competition entries while I was there.
Aldershot's table, I think there had been a modelling/painting display, but it was getting toward home-time. They used to organise their own show, in February, but it went the way of all flesh some time ago, one of my first big-purchases was from that show back in 1991 when it was still held in Fleet Library, or the adjoining Hartington centre, if I recall correctly?
T is for Tank Tracks
The information board is also tracked, and while seemingly cobbled together from recovered parts (there was half a Sherman turret sticking out of the bog at one point), with [possibly!] three Churchill road wheels and two Valentine return rollers?