Dele in trouble "with the Chinese flu" comment. Since said sorry. There used to be a comment permanently on our geography class blackboard. " THINK BEFORE YOU INK!"
Just noticed this is page number 617. Worth remembering that 617 Squadron is the unit that was specially formed to undertake the raid on the Ruhr dams in 1943, hence afterward being called "The Dam Busters". An astonishing feat of flying that led them to fly their Lancaster bombers (which normally bombed from 20,000 feet or more) at treetop height all the way to the Ruhr and back, losing more than one crashing into power lines. They then undertook a number of specialist missions under the command of Leonard Cheshire, a great pilot and great man for his charity work (who married Sue Ryder). My apologies for this detour, this is clearly nothing to do with football but also should never be forgotten.
My Uncle Jack flew a Blenheim,which was a flying turkey.He was shot down after just 2 trips and is in the RAF cemetery in Dunkirk. It's a wonder any flight crews survived. Actor James Stewart did,though. The leader of the Dambusters survived that trip but he and his crew crashed later on. His dog was run over and killed the day the Dambusters took off.
My father volunteered for aircrew during WW2, but having discovered he was an apprentice (he was a printer), decided he would be better suited to an RAF technical trade. For reasons best know to themselves, they made him a radar operator. He was then assigned to a mobile radar unit (very high tech at the time) and ended up on Sword Beach on D-Day. He then followed XXX Corps across Europe, being particularly busy when reaching Eindhoven at the end of the attempts to relieve Arnhem. He later went through Bergen-Belsen concentration camp and finished on the Baltic Coast. His small unit of 30-ish people were responsible for the contacts that resulted in 100 German aircraft shot down including two jets. I pieced all this together from official records and his diary, he never spoke of it. He never went to any reunions or took part in any parades. There was no support, it was just a matter of getting back to civilian life and he did so by pretending it didn't happen. Sorry to digress but I am so proud of him.
Good story,Vimhawk. 2 of my mates dads got away from Dunkirk but one had been shot in the arm. He refused to talk about it!
Isn't it funny how the people who spent the past four years bawling about how they think Jeremy Corbyn has links to the IRA haven't got an opinion about the Irish election result?
So who is looking forward to getting to Birmingham faster? Apparently nobody is capable of dealing with the amount of time a train currently takes (you know, by planning their day or business etc), and to arrive quicker will generate billions to the economy (of course this will have to be very many billions in order to offset the cost) - though I can't quite understand how they can be so sure of that. What we can be sure of is that by the time it is finished HS2 will (1) cost more and (2) save less time, than is currently being claimed. One problem seems to be that when you are talking about such a huge amount of money, so that adding a few (or tens in this case) of billions to the budget is so hard to comprehend that the government finds it impossible to control the spending. Meanwhile my wife who works for the NHS has to buy her own pens and has difficulty getting a diary. That's the only costs that seem to be controlled! So if you're interested, the cost of HS2 in smaller numbers is this: £190,802 per metre. Yes you read that right. Meanwhile it's hard to get a figure for how much the public received for privatising British Rail in the first place. I'll wager however that it wasn't very much compared to the massive subsidies that were and still are paid out to the operating companies. It's really a sham of a privatisation since the rail industry now costs more in subsidies than it did when it was BR, so what is private about it? Also check out who actually owns the franchises. I also understand that Railtrack, the public company that runs the track (following the failed private version) charges the operators less than the going commercial rate for their services, and all losses of that company become part of the national debt. But we need a new track for this 'private' industry, so of course the public will pay. And of course pay again when it comes to higher fares. Edit: Quite by chance I just read that Crossrail is now set to cost £18.25 billion, again a huge amount. However, this cost includes 26 miles of tunnels. And of course the project is fantastically complex since it crosses some of the most expensive real estate in the world. Surely tunnelling is quite expensive! Maybe it's just me, but Crossrail seems to be more value for money, AND more useful to it's intended audience. I also saw what seemed initially to be a rather flippant comment about HS2 which the more I think about it, it actually isn't. It concerns how these new terminus (see HS1) seem to come complete with massive walkways before you can get anywhere, probably because of where they are located, but also because new designers seem to have a thing for pedestrian traffic planning resulting in longer walks. His comment was that 10 minutes of the saved time will be lost by trying to get anywhere useful when you get to the other end!
HS2 is yet another example of the Sunk Cost Fallacy, where an ever-spiralling budget coupled with delay after delay aren't reasons to drop the whole thing because so much has already been spent on what's clearly a white elephant considering the benefit of HS2 is that you get to Leeds twenty minutes quicker than you do on current rolling stock It says it all that, when Sadiq Khan dropped the Garden Bridge, the only defence of the project was "B-b-but we already spent so much!!!" as if that's a reason for an obvious vanity project to be built, and the Tory mindset hasn't budged an inch
Coincidentally, after a time and motion study, this was calculated to be the cost of Mertesacker to Arsenal during his spell as a player at the club.
