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Behind enemy lines

Tonight I find myself sausageside. The evening however has not been without its errrrrrrrrr compensations

This morning I shall be in Oxford

I know that it is very easy to form a poor opinion of a place when it is tonking with rain but shall we just say that my worst fears of Cardiff were entirely justified. Walk through the city centre at ten thirty on a Monday morning & you realise that it isn’t so much the heart of a reinvigorated Principality as a repository of the unemployed unemployable. Even a cursory glace might lead the casual observer to conclude that main thing that both men & women have in common (aside from BMI scores in the low 50s) are the tattoos. In fact one feral couple arguing in the middle of Queen Street were so dense that light had started to bend towards them: I cannot not begin to articulate how pleased I was to see that M4 Eastbound motorway sign.

This morning & as if by way of contrast, you find me on my way to Oxford; an altogether more civilised destination. It’s off to Oxford today before getting on a plane this evening.

Pip pip.

This morning I have to go to Cardiff

I am less than chuffed at the prospect

This morning I have been toiling over a hot aga

The vension (with some smoked bacon & field mushrooms) has been simmering away in a lot of red wine, for a few hours now

& now its time to pop it into the Aga's bottom oven & leave it until supper time

Seen while walking the dogs yesterday afternoon

This evening I shall be mainly taking ale in this fine hostelry

This morning dear readers you find me on a train

Much as it pains me to admit this, your humble correspondent is on his was to Manchester (not good) to attend the Conservative Party Conference (even worse). Quite what I am doing there I am not altogether certain (bribing & blackmailing MPs & prospective Parliamentary candidates) other than updating The Book that we will use on The Glorious Day identify The Guilty

Parallel parking & freemasons

Firstly, may I take this opportunity to thank the eight of you that emailed me yesterday on the topic of my ability to park a car (or lack of skill thereof). Can I, in open forum, assure you all that;
a) Yes, I do have a ‘pair’
b) & can in fact parallel park ...

...it’s just that sometimes I chose not to.

I think it was sometime last winter after a bit of a lunch, I was popping into the offie for a couple of packs of smokos & a bottle of Thunderbird to pass away the afternoon when I inadvertently mounted the pavement at quite some velocity – at least that’s what the Coroner (or Old Whiffy to use his Masonic nickname) said at the inquest. At least the awfully polite yet rather young policeman very quickly reassured me that he would be able to prise the World Wildlife Fund chugger from where she was jammed into the front wheel arch with the aid of the small crowbar that just happened to be on the passenger seat. The officer went on to explain that I shouldn’t worry because “there are plenty more where she came from”. Ever since, if I have inadvertently ended up with a wheel on the head of some old wino selling copies of the Big Issue, I haven’t given it a second thought.

Farewell Disco Dave II...

Hello Disco Dave III

Tuesday Night Dinner

Tonight I dined at the East India Club

The first bottle of club port was delicious, the second even better. May I take this opportunity to commend it to your good offices.

Today, I have been down at the clay range

This afternoon...

... I have been watching Boy play rugby

Mr FM still isn't here

& is still undercover

Mr FM won't be here today

He is in fact deep undercover on a super secret corporate mission

Comrade Brown, Oliver Reed & China from the back of an S-Class Mercedes

Have been enjoying what is euphemistically known as the fleshpots of Asia a little local colour for the last week, you find me snug in my bed as not a bad bottle whisks me westwards in a haze of brandy fumes & carbon dioxide emissions. In fact I thank my lucky stars that that I am going home tonight because even by the standards on one of the former Crown Colony’s rather stinky sewers things have been getting just a smidge out of hand, our local partners having just decided to go on another forty eight hour binge. As the knurled old cock doc that diagnosed my damn near total pancreatic failure earlier on this morning pointed out when his hand finally stopped trembling, the condition can be brought on by an excess of marathon running or a little too much enthusiasm at the bar: when I told him that I would immediate cut down on my weekly mileage, he produced a colour chart & declared that my deep purple nose has reached that particular hue known in certain circles as the Oliver Reed.

That is why I have been sent home & why I am currently self medicating with ever increasingly aggressive doses of Dr Free Markets Five Star Restorative.

As we taxied across the tarmac at Chep Lap Kok earlier on, I had cause to peruse the UK broadsheets for the first time since last Tuesday & it really does appear that in my absence, Comrade Brown as got himself into the sort of bother that is normally only reserved for overly ambitious Tory MPs & Liberal Democrats with a penchant for rent boys. Now before everyone gets all snotty – this is my bandwidth & if anyone is going to canter around the moral high ground on his hobby horse, it is going to be me – there is absolutely nothing wrong in cutting shabby deals with homicidal despots ... as my partners in China pointed out over dinner the other night. & do you know what, we were all laughing so much at the very thought of an ethical foreign policy that I nearly forgot to let them have briefcase with the bearer bonds in it when they handed over the end user certificates.

Later the very same evening as Zhong, my usual driver when I am upcountry very correctly pointed out, the Chinese government probably cares more about what their public thinks of them than any of the pondlife in the Westminster Village worries about what its electorate is thinking. Of course once the gentlemen in Beijing know what you are thinking, you are more than likely to have the six o’clock knock from the paramilitary security police followed by an early morning appointment with the business end of a Kalashnikov down at the local quarry. Mr Zhong didn’t have a chance to expand upon this theory any further & instead set about demonstrating how the suspension in the new S-Class copes with those who have been bypassed by China’s economic miracle. I must say that when we drove over the old crone that was begging outside the Club Big Boss I was at first a little disappointed by the rear axles rebound damping until I realised that by mistake I had turned on the seats massage function. I gave me quite a start I can tell you, mind you not as much of a surprise as the karaoke girl who was sitting on my lap got. Cost me another 500 bl**dy Yuan.

Still, at least while Comrade Brown is hiding behind a bunch of Scottish incompetents, leaving the unelected Mandy to get on with trying to make an even bigger mess of the country, at least the former Iron Chancellor’s current state of complete denial precludes him from any further Keynesian heroics with our money – see, there is an upside in everything. My joint venture partners on the other hand have a much quicker way of dealing with failed politicians as a Party leader in Western China found out this week. As Dave Copperfield once said, the question we must ask ourselves is what can we learn from other cultures?

Mr FM is still in Hong Kong

Sir Henry Pottinger must be turning in his grave

This afternoon dear readers it behoves me & I do this with leaden heart, to bring you devastating news on two counts. Firstly, we have touched upon the Captain’s Bar at the Mandarin Oriental before but as you can see from the photo below, taken last night, there is now something missing...

...yes, it gone all namby pamby no smoking. Secondly, & even more concerning is that I actually had to explain to the barman how to build a pink gin. Can you believe that? Forget Hannibal ad portas, he has already kicked them in & laid waste to Rome

& this evening you find me in Chongqing (again)

I am supposed to be carousing in Hong Kong

I am not supposed to be in Shenzhen & definitely not supposed to be having this for supper

Yum!

Today you find me in Hong Kong

Tonight you find me.....

... in Lan Kwai Fong (aka the Fong)

& this morning you find me farting about at home...

... before getting on a flight this afternoon

Sadly yes, its time to get back on the plane again

Sorry, but I have been a little busy today...

...what with it being a Bank Holiday & all. Therefore I'm afraid that all I can offer is some more New Landrover Porn

Normal service will resume tomorrow, which is in about half a hours time!

Larry Land Rover III is dead...

Long live Larry Land Rover IV

That's the last of the harvest in

This evening...

... I think that I'll drop in here for a post-Bisley sharpener

Helicopters

There has been a lot of recent press speculation about our Forces the woeful lack of helicopters in Afghanistan

This is because tonight they all seem to by over FM Towers

Does anyone know where I can get a low milage late model ZSU-23-4 ?

The large grain store this evening

The harvest is coming in

Sunday afternoon...

...& todays walk took us (as if by chance) to the dogs favourite pool

Oh yes & then afterwards, having found yet more fruit at the back of the freezer, time to knock out another demijohn of damson gin which sould be just about ready in time for Christmas

Fridays busy schedule

OK, so here's a very quick run down on today's programme:

Go to work ... no. Instead I shall drive down to my local Land Rover dealer & test drive one of the new Discovery 4s.

That done, its off to Winchester to Moto Rapido to test ride a Monster 696.

By then, it will be about lunchtime, so I will probably stop in at The Mayfly for a little something

& then back home (maybe via the old gunshop) to do some admin & admittedly, a little work in the form of a couple of conference calls before possibly stopping in here for a swifty

on the way to my usual Friday night haunt & meet up with The Englishman. Some days aren't so bad

Damsons

A swift review of the damson trees on Sunday evening reveals that maybe autumn isn’t that far away & it will soon be that time again

Hannibal ante portas!

Just because I was away last week doesn’t mean that I wasn’t reading the office email traffic

It might have looked as though I had my eye off the ball because once I had read anything of interest, I went back & marked it unopened

I might not have opined on various issues not because I don’t hold strong views but because I like explaining face to face exactly where I stand – I don’t need a BerryBerry server to hide behind

& to our Finance Director that chose last Monday, the first day of my vacation, to try & score point points off me ... I shall be in the office in an hour or so

Home again...

Looks like its back to the office for me

Last night

The Mayenne river, southern Normandy

The Normandy Bridgehead: Family FM's 'Tac HQ'

Places to have lunch in Normandy: Sainte-Mère-Église

of US 82nd Airborne Division fame

Family holidays, FM style

Come along children, just around the corner is a wonderful exhibition of cubist street art that reinterprets impressionism in the existentialist vernacular but from the post feminist perspective

P.S. in the background ... we have at long last found THE pieman

That carbon moment

So as you can see, the Ducati has acquired a little bit of carbon fibre in the shape of a fly screen – no Ducati in all fairness should every be with at least a whiff of the black stuff

In any case, she is now in the grain store, ready for a very very early start because tomorrow morning, before the first sparrow has farted, your humble correspondent is off to Normandy

British Day 8: If you have £5m burning a hole in your pocket

Savills would quite like to sell you this

Saddlewood Manor is approached down a long drive flanked by its own paddocks and farm land leading to a gravelled parking area beside the north of the house. The house has pretty elevations built of Cotswold stone with stone mullion windows under a Cotswold stone tile roof. It dates from the late 17th Century with later additions. Internally many original features have been retained, including carved stone fireplaces, exposed beams and natural floors, whilst the property has undergone extensive renovation works including the creation of a superb kitchen/breakfast room, a large entrance hall and utility area in addition to an impressive multi-media room/library. The house is perfectly suited to family living and entertaining, enhanced by the large party barn/club room in the adjacent stone barn.

Now like me, go buy a lottery ticket

British Day 7: Land Rover Series One

Assuming that I had just won the lottery, one of my lesser purchases would be one of these...

...the venerable Series One Land Rover. On those one of two sunny Friday evenings that we have each summer I simply cannot think of a more perfect car for driving over to The Englishman’s & thence, across his fields to the pub. In fact, as it’s a perfect evening I wouldn’t just have the canvas off – the screen would be down & the doors off to boot.

British Day 5: Despite the rain, the harvest has started down in these yerrrr parrrrrts

The harvest has changed quite a lot, even in my lifetime ... but not that much

British Day 3: This evening I might stop off here for a pint on the way home

Sundays are clays days

Having rather enjoyed my trip to Barbury Shooting last weekend I thought that I’d pop down there again but this time, I took Family FM

& although Youngest is a tad small for a shotgun, she greatly amused herself firing the clays off for us

As you can see from the picture at the top of the post, we had three Berettas in the rack, our 12 & 20-bores, supplemented by a Silver Pigeon 28-bore, borrowed from the school for Boy’s No. 7 shot frivolity

Mrs FM in the meantime was also busy getting lead in the air. Because I have shrunk the size of the photo below, you can’t see the clay, hence the insert

But all I have to say is that both Nipper & the Meme Sahib are getting way way too proficient for my liking – next weekend I might well slip back up to the range on my own for extended private practice. Goodness knows I need it

Fast Women - Part 2

We first touched upon a certain persons driving habits in Fast Women - Part 1 but today I would just like to be very clear on this point - when it comes to driving cars in general, & 4x4s in particular, Mrs FM is a far far better driver than your humble correspondent which is why I don’t ‘do’ the whole women drivers thing. I tend to pootle about looking over the hedge to see what’s in the field. The Meme Sahib? She is far far more errrrrrrrr focused as those of you that have driven with her can testify to. New passengers have been known to become slightly perturbed the first time she throws 2 tonnes of Land Rover into a 4 wheel drift round a corner but that is not half as perturbed as drivers coming the other way down the lane can be – even the milk tanker drivers know to pull over because this simply isn’t a game of chicken: Mrs FM doesn’t back down/give way/. Ever.

Returning however to yesterday’s topic of Family FM’s Illegal Immigrant French Road Kill Extravaganza & the question about how to keep track of your tally, provisional scoring for running any of these scumbags over is as follows:

10 points: Splattered Somali, pavement pancake Pakistani or similar

If they are still twitching, deduct 2.5 points

If they are still twitching but you reverse back over ‘em, add 5 points

25 points: Knife wielding Kosovans, Afghans, Genghis Khan or any one in a camper van called Stan

Cumulative points are multiplied by 1.25 for matched pairs or doubled for five of a kind

500 points for a flush: That’s 1 each from Africa, Asia, the Balkans, Indian sub-continent & the former Soviet Union

1000 points for a royal flush: that’s the same as an ordinary flush but as you do an impersonation of the Duke of Edinburgh as you mow ‘em all down

Trip to Calais anyone?

French highway robbery & other travel news

In a couple of weeks time, Family FM will be driving through France...

Migrant gangs in Calais are targeting British holidaymakers in terrifying 'highway robberies'. Would-be illegal immigrants are forming human roadblocks to force motorists passing through the French port town to stop. Travellers are then robbed at knifepoint by the migrants, who are desperate for funds to help them sneak into the UK.

Now let me see here: in the red corner we have a hoard of knife wielding would be illegal immigrants forming a human road block with intent to commit robbery. In the blue corner we will have over 2 tonnes of Land Rover driven by Mrs FM. This is only going to end one way...

Yesterday was another busy dog day

Summer showers

Walking back into the village across the fields this afternoon

"Please love me"

Tonight, your humble correspondent has been at a private viewing of the new Banksy exhibition

Apparently it is counter culture ... I can’t comment on that as my schwerpunkt was getting drunk ...

which is why you find me in some cotemporary hotel that is so bl**dy contemporary my room doesn’t have a TV, all it has one of those stupid Cox’s computers

But worse still, it is so damn trendy, it doesn’t even have a Corby Trouser Press. Curses!

How to spend my £604 tax rebate

The only real consideration is that it that I want to spend it on something that will really upset GFW Westminster types/guardianistas/urban living liberals etc...

Current options under detailed consideration include:

1. One of these rather spiffy Savage .17HMRs

which are now availble in the UK as left hookers

2. A second hand 6.5 x 55 barrel for my Blaser

3. A new sound moderator for the Blaser

4. A shotgun certificate for Boy who has now turned 12

& a little 28-guage for him

On sober reflection Option 4 will probably upset people the most if you recall this dear readers

The last three days

Sorry for the lack of posting but I have been a little busy over the last few days. Friday, I was out giving the little Ducati a good rousting

It is now down at the garage having a new chain & sprocket set, a little bit of very tarty carbon fibre fitted & the electrics sorted out – yes yes I know, it’s an Italian bike & if they don’t dissolve on first contact with water, the electrics fail nearly as quickly that anything British. However it keeps blowing a fuse on the 7.5 amp circuit which takes out the rev counter, indicators, neutral & warning lights. So it needs sorting out

The rest of the weekend has been spent on kiddie duties as Mrs FM has been away doing her disabled riding thing. I tell you, she is that bl**dy worthy that if only she weren’t a white middle class Navy brat, they’d have given her at least an MBE by now, if not an ‘O’

So the nippers are happy because they have an written understanding with father when he is in charge – if they keep quiet & out of the way, I’ll pony up for the bribes. I am out of pocket to the tune of a pile of pizzas, ice cream,stack of new DVDs & a trip to the toy shop for Youngest but FM Towers has been peaceful all weekend. I completely fail to see why people make such a fuss about bringing up kids!

Today I have the day off

so I shall be taking my time over breakfast

The Mother in Law from Hell has had a bit of an accident

Yesterday afternoon I got a phone call saying that the the Wicked Witch of the West had had an accident on her way over to FM Towers. She narrowly escaped injury after she she was forced to make an emergency landing in a garden on the other side of the turnpike, after encountering a problem while on final approach

The Civil Aviation Authority has already issued a preliminary report, stating that the pilots vision became impaired by black cat's tail. The absence of a post-crash fire was likely due to insufficient fuel on board & no one on the ground was injured.

The photograph below was taken at the scene to show the extent of damage to her aircraft - she was really lucky .. we were not so

Yesterday Evening

Driving across the fields with The Englishman on our way to the pub

This afternoon, we have been cutting the grass

Time to put mower away & have a cup of tea

That Friday feeling

Its a beautiful summers evening here. I think that I might just pop in here for a sharpener on the way home

There is little evidence of prehistoric settlement but the village was mentioned by name in 940 and a village grew up around the church and manor house, already standing by 1086. The village was comparatively small. Its assessment for taxation in 1334 was among the lower totals of the area but it subsequently expanded. There were 86 poll-tax payers in 1377, and by the 16th century it was apparently the largest village in the parish. Settlement seems to have remained around the lower part of ‘the street’ in the 17th century, but cottages were built on the slightly higher, better drained, land around the Green in the 18th century. A public house called the Swan stood at the south corner from 1746 at the latest

Things to do after you have spent the afternoon down at the cricket club

An afternoon down at the cricket club

Boy even made a few runs today

right up until he decided to start giving it the big yahoo...

Of Route 100, dweebs & a baritone exhaust note that could stir the most girded of loins

I have driven Vermont’s Route 100 & don’t propose to go into what a great road it truly is. If you are into that sort of thing, trust when I say that it is a box you want to tick before you hand your car keys back for the final time. So tonight dear readers we start with a short note sent to Walt from a chum of his who is a copper in Vermont...

Ya know I get to see a lot of weirdness here in Vermont, duct-taped ferrets covered in KY...farm animals on rooftops...UFO abductees’ that have never left their own town but somehow were teleported to another planet by aliens...BTDT, got the t-shirt, wore the damn shirt out.

The serious note was an attempted suicide. He lived. My shift is far from over...I have a sense of foreboding evil....plane crash? A busload of strippers runs out of gas on a dark backroad? The DNA from a Porcupine and a Moose combine producing a 1000 pound mobile cactus? I shall report further, if I survive...

Both assuming & discerning ... . I note a Ducati with a baritone exhaust note that could stir the most girded of loins... & how right you are sir– nothing sounds like Ducati. You can keep those slash pipes that people insist of fitting to Harleys when they want them to sound even more like a tractor. Carbon race cans on Japanese transverse 4s – I fitted my GSX-Rs & YZFs with Microns – done that one. Its all well & good, but as the Ducatisti know, nothing sounds like an Italian V twin on overrun as you roll off the throttle & peel into a corner...

It isn’t just a uniquely beautiful & throaty engine noise so much as one commentator put it, the complete symphony of internal combustion. I feel no need to apologise for my current outrageous levels of testosterone

Time for a swifty?

Turn out of The Englishman’s, head a few miles through the lanes ... a couple of lefts ...navigate through the sheep in the road ... avoid the milk tanker lorry coming straight at you ... make a few right turns but suddenly you might be gripped by the urge for a cheeky half. So its just as well that by now, you should find yourself outside here.

This little oasis, The Bridge Inn, was built around 1800 but pre-dates the neighbouring Kennet & Avon Canal which was opened quite recently ... in 1810. Road, bridge, canal, pub - let’s just say that that down in these yerrrr parrrrrrts, this is how we like our ‘transport interchanges’ & 'service areas'.

Desert issue?

It is often said that officers are issued with ‘G10’ Labradors. I suppose that on that basis, we could be considered to be currently troop trialling the new desert issue lab...

Of course, any lab worth its salt considers the dessert issue to be more pressing

“My heart is in the Church of England but not my mind” – Alister Hardy

We have touched upon village churches before (incidentally, it’s one of my favourite posts) & I thought that we could start this week with a picture of the church in our village

Apparently, there has been a church on this site since the 12th Century & indeed the first recorded parish priest was in 1306. No one is quite sure quite how old the current church is, but village records show that the nave & tower were added in circa 1523 & it is clearly shown on this parish map from 1773

The church was rebuilt by J.L. Pearson in the mid 1850s and re-opened in 1858. A newspaper report claimed "the number of sittings is 121". Clearly Victorian congregations were a little larger than they are these days. Mind you, there used to be in excess of 60 dwellings; today there are 34 and the village has a population of just under 100.

Really, I am a working dog

This morning I have mainly been out on the Ducati

Right, thats it

I'm done with this week & its been a real pig. Things are only now just starting to look up because I'm off to the pub with The Englishman

See y'all later

Zombies Part 2

Firstly last weekend, I walk into the sitting room to find Boy & his Pal watching Vic Reeves investigates Jack the Ripper. There followed a brief but erudite debate about the falling standards of television channels scheduling followed a not so bloodless coup which saw your humble correspondent elevated to OC Remote Control. The ensuing channel change to Where Eagles Dare was accompanied by such level of wailing that I knew that I had properly discharged my paternal duties.

So there I am trying to explain to two eleven year old boys the full majesty of Richard Burton’s career, the scale of his body of work coupled with the importance of this movie in the evolution on modern film when I’m asked...

Boy: Does anybody get ‘owned’?

YHC: Eh?

Pal: Does anyone have blown to bits?

YHC: This isn’t a Jason Statham film lad

Boy: Are there any Zombies in it?

My life is rapidly assuming all of the characteristics of a Calvin & Hobbes cartoon strip

I just knew that I shouldn't have mentioned 'convertable' Land Rovers...

... because currently my mailbox is rather full of pictures like this

from PK

Land Rover envy

The sun is shining & I too wish that just at the moment, I had a convertable Land Rover like reader NM

Today we have been down at the Carew River

More here & here

Sorry for the lack of posting...

but Family FM have been away for a couple of days

I am beginning to think that Mrs FM might have a slightly obsessive personality

& before anybody asks, you really can’t expect a Tight Head Prop (No. 3) to understand a complex instruction like “please hand your shirt in after the match”. As for No.11, Fly Halves generally can understand such an instruction but are normally too much of a prima donna to do what they are told

Il Monstro: The Devil made me do it officer

Following on from Friday's post, the Devil might not have made me do it but can you sense the hand of Mrs FM in this...

& before anybody comments, between us, we have owned that may Japanese transverse 4s (GSX-Fs, GSXRs, YZFRs & a ZXR)

but She That Shall Be Obeyed wanted something a little different

& as AJDS commented the other day, God rides a V twin & when it comes to V twins, nothing & I do mean nothing, not even a Norton, leaks oil/electrics fail/generally breaks down like a Ducati

Today at Twickenham

Family FM have been at the Guinness Premiership Cup Final

Fast Women - Part 1

I am reposting this today as a little livener for events that are likely to take place over the weekend. It harks back to a happier pre-veracious veins two nippers grey haired time when my life was altogether more simple & could fit lock stock into my Alfa Romeo. So this morning dear readers I humbly commend you to this little missive on the redoubtable Mrs FM...

Mrs Free Market has been described as the sort of woman that helped build the Empire: she is able, organised & processes an iron will (as well as being monstrously competitive). Altogether, she is a much better & more pleasant person than her licentious husband. Received wisdom is however, these are the sort of people you have to watch out for. Certainly in her case, behind this facade of respectability there resides something hideously volatile & socially reprehensible.

My view is to blame this modern British society - too many rules, too many taxes & not enough emphasis on individual freedoms. The so-called experts will of course disagree (at the taxpayers expense). They will attribute this sort of antisocial behaviour to the levels of the brain chemical serotonin, which connects the cerebral cortex (which controls rational though & speech), to the limbic system (responsible for emotion)

Serotonin prevents overtly aggressive & impulsive behaviour by ensuring a balance in the connections between the two brain centres, making sure that the grab the AK & kill 'em all messages issued from the limbic centre are tempered to behaviour levels which are vital for anyone wishing to adopt the cloak of acceptable human behaviour.

The less well chemically endowed than others have a statistically increased probability of developing Anti-Social Personality Disorder (APD), a condition responsible for shortening a few queues in MacDonald's. This unfortunate condition is however, easily detectable in early life - signs for parents to watch out for include slaughtering beloved family pets & pulling the arms off other children.

Frankly, as time goes by, these unfortunate people have ever decreasing options. Either get their psychotic offspring to adopt a more acceptable behaviour patterns or pay the trick cyclists bill.This however is Brown's Bankrupt Britain - no one takes responsibility for anything ... so these parents do nothing.

Much easier to send the children off to the pub for ten pints of wife beater & fight please, landlord. If they don't fall to pieces, like a cheap suit, in their local, then when someone cuts them up in the traffic on the way home they will feel compelled to give chase, force them off the road & hack them it bits with the machete that just happened to be under the passenger seat officer.

Mrs FM however hides her social deviancy & more unsavoury social tendencies in a slightly more sophisticated manner by racing boats, as well as driving cars & riding motorcycles very very quickly. The reason that she had to dispose of her RGV250 was that she blew the engine. (Motor Cycle News ran a story about the full extent of the rebuild it required)

Rather than modifying her behaviour patterns & riding technique, she went a purchased a ZXR400 as a replacement - her principle complaint with it being, having chased me down an Italian autostrada, was that she could only get 135mph out of it. As the strap line on her bike's illegally small number plate said ... Fear No Man. I'm afraid, very afraid. I advise you all to be the same.

“There’s a breathless hush in the close tonight...”

Not so much a bumping pitch & a blinding light - in fact the pitch was so 'flat' - please excuse the camera angle - that had nothing in it for the bowlers but here we have Boy trying to give it a little air in an attempt to get some movement...

Sadly there was no swing to be had that day & consequently he got smacked all over the park for 6 overs. However laughing at his weekends bowling figures isn’t the reason for this post, its little piece of cricket trivia found by Alan

The first ‘box’ was used in 1874

The first helmet was used in 1974

It took 100 years for men to realise that the brain is also important. Apparently.

As for Sunday's result, the opposition were 161 for 3, after their 35 overs; a very respectable score. However Boy's team made 162 in 17 overs, having lost only 1 wicket. As Boy said afterwards, I knew our batsmen would bail us out !

Its what the back of your Land Rover was designed for

Snapped at Badminton Horse Trials over the weekend...

... ... & please note that despite the profusion on blankets & snoozies, we really are roughty toughty working gundogs...it’s just that it is a little bit sunny at the moment & we are both having extreme difficulty staying awake

& to bring you all up to date

But over the weekend, Youngest at the age of six years & 10 months joined the ranks of the shooting fraternity

Yes, she did hit the target & yes she is keen as mustard to have another go. Now some of you, especially those of you whose daughters burn through ammunition, will remember the sinking feeling as yet another cost line goes on to the family balance sheet. I’m currently in that place.

Some of the land at the back of FM Towers

"...gracefully surrendering the things of your youth"

Today, I got rid of my bike

As you might be able to make out in the photo, it is covered in dust, having sat unused in the back of the barn for the last 3 years. The problem is, having got rid of that, I now want a new toy (as does incidently Mrs FM). Now that really is a dangerous state of affairs!

Its still grim up North

Apologies for today’s lack of posting however for his myriad sins, once again your humble correspondent has been up North today

Diabolus fecit, ut id facerem ...

This morning we have mainly been chasing rabbits

Just a little bit of my world

Morning after

Apologies for todays very late posting however a lot of yesterday was spent errrrrrrr toasting the roast beef of Old England. In fact your humble correspondent was a guest at this little do...

Royal Marine Matt Croucher, 24, was named Englishman of the Year by charity The St George’s Day Club — for throwing himself on a live grenade in Afghanistan to save comrades. L/Cpl Matt, of Birmingham — who has received the George Cross — was congratulated by Chelsea Pensioners as he received the accolade at Grosvenor House Hotel.

I seem to remember raising my first glass at about midday. I recall leaving the pub at about tenish (I think) but after that it goes a tad fuzzy. Needless to say, Alka Seltar has figured large in my life today.

Thought for the Day

After my little weekend faux pas, I am reminded of a comment in an email from AJDS...

A married man should forget his mistakes. There's no use in two people remembering the same thing!

Let's just say that I there is still no evidence of any global warming round at FM Towers

Damnation without relief

So your humble correspondent got home at 7 am this morning. Everyone including the dogs were a-bed, so not wanting to disturb anyone I fed the dogs & then had some breakfast myself.
First downstairs was Boy – I fixed him something to eat. Next was Youngest. I asked her what she wanted & she replied Cornflakes followed by cake. What cake, I asked & received the reply, the half of Mummy’s birthday cake that we didn’t have yesterday.

OH SH1T !

Let’s just say that a lot of today has been conducted in silence

& this morning in Beijing

Just think of the airmiles!

Your humble correspondent got back from eight days in Hong Kong & Chongqing early on Monday morning. In fact I didn’t manage to get to FM Towers on Monday night as most of it was spent in the office. Today, as both the rain & the Easter Exodus from London starts, your find me back at Heathrow...

Today I am off to Beijing for ... wait for it now ... a 2 hour meeting. So its straight back out again in the afternoon & via Hong Kong, home for seven o’clock on Saturday morning.

Yep, still here

... but sadly, on the redeye back to London tonight

Its Saturday. This must be Hong Kong

Still sleepless in Chongqing

The People's Liberation Monument, located in the center of Chongqing. It was at one time the highest building in the area but now is dwarfed by numerous shopping centers. The tower was originally named as "Monument for the victory over Axis armies" but after the Communist takeover is got errrrrr “rebranded”.

This morning, it is raining in Chongqing

& today will be another busy day in Hong Kong

So its back to Cathay’s sultry charms

Tonight I shall be partaking of a few post long haul bracers in one of my favourite bars

The first day of spring

The dogs are asleep in the sun outside & its time to on with all of the chores that have been building up over the winter.

That is probably why this afternoon, your humble correspondent is getting back on a plane (again)

I wouldn’t dare post this seriously & live

so instead, I shall say that this is being published ironically

You have to remember that the adjective that Mrs FM uses most often to describe me is “irritating”

& if you are down to your last half a bar...

...this cottage is available in the next village

Enough 'character' for you?

& a huge sorry to Bird Dog, for copying his idea

First car

OK, its Tuesday morning confession time - mine was one of these, but a lot lot older than the one in the picture below

& yes, it was bright yellow. So come on now you lot, fess up, what was your first set of wheels

Trouble & Strife Part 2: Marital Armageddon

Regular readers might recall that just over a week ago, your humble correspondent selflessly tried to redefine the boundaries of original sin – at least as far as the memsahib was concerned. Only now that both my primary & secondary injuries are starting to heal can I come completely clean & confess to all my dear readers that my transgressions didn’t exactly cease at the end of that post.

Let’s just fast forward a little from where we left off last Friday & say that the drive down through France was being conducted in the most terrible ominous silence. Holiday plans lay in ruins & timings had all gone to ratsh1t. Looking at Disco Dave’s satnav & doing a few quick sums, it was abundantly clear that we weren’t going to make it to our destination in the Alps that day. Thinking quickly & in a vainglorious attempt to deflect some of the hellfire & damnation that would inevitably soon be raining down on my head, we needed somewhere to stay for the night. A swift call to Office Wife would ensure that we had somewhere comfortable to stay for the night for Office Wife steers me around the globe with unerring precision.

Sure enough, 20 minutes later, my BlackBerry hummed as the details of a suitable reservation. Plug in the hotel’s address & off we set for Chambery with an ETA of 2330.

To cut to the chase, could we find the hotel? Could we hell! After the best part of an hours fruitless search trying to find our hotel or indeed any hotel with a room proved a dismal failure & there was nothing to do but to drive up to Bourg St Maurice, park up at the railway station & spend what little remained of the night in the car. Disco Dave’s computer said that the outside temperature was -10 degs C. Trust me when I say that the atmosphere a considerably colder in the car.

Trouble & Strife Part 1: Mrs FM in the media

It would seem that while we were away on holiday, Mrs FM & Larry Landrover attracted the attentions of the media…

Of course, only some lily livered liberal journo could come up with a strap line like “A Landrover makes it through the flood”. It’s a Landrover you utter nanger & just as importantly, it is being piloted by little Mrs Aggression herself – trust me when I say that that particular combination would make clean through the very Gates of Hades & back again … without even having to engage the diff lock.

& its back to school for the nippers today

Final Day

Sadly today will be our last in the Alps

Still, we will squeeze in another day on the slopes & then drive the 789 miles home overnight.

& most likely there will be more of the same today

Tonight, I shall be mainly out on the toot

Yesterday afternoon

The view towards Mount Blanc...

... from Les Arcs 1950

Mr Free Markets Top Skiing Tip: No. 39

Your mid-afternoon cup of hot chocolate will be considerably enhanced by the addition of a hefty tot of dark rum.

Today could well be another long hard day

Its been another hard day on the slopes

Today we have mainly been skiing

St Valentines Day

After the events of the other day (see posts passim), were you expecting anything different?

Mr Free Markets masterclass in how to destruction test your marriage

1. Promise the Memsahib, on pain of death, that you will get home from China at the very latest by early on Thursday evening even because first thing on Friday morning Family FM are off skiing

2. Phone the War Office on Thursday morning to say that you have landed early at Heathrow & things are looking good

3. Phone the Omnipresent One mid afternoon to explain that the boss is ill & your humble & by now grovelling correspondent is having to take his place at medium to heavy duty corporate presentation on Friday. Consequently you won’t be home & it will also mean that she is driving to the Alps with the nippers, solo. You will fly out as soon as you can.

(When I say that an icy silence was all pervasive at this point, I am not talking about the crisp clear atmosphere of a high Alpine resort)

4. 0745 Friday morning - boss announces he has made a Lazarus like recovery. Inform memsahib, devise Plan B & start to calculate the net present value of future alimony payments

5. Jump in taxi to St Pancras Station figuring that the Eurostar will be the fastest way to get to Ashford International Train Station. Inform the Little Blond Ball of Fury of potential RV location & timings

6. On arriving at St Pancras, discover that you can’t buy a ticket just to Ashford. In fact, they wont sell you a ticket to Paris & allow you to alight at Ashford

7. Get taxi to Charing Cross Station & inform the Destroyer of Worlds about new Plan C

8. On arriving at Charing Cross discover that there is a security alert somewhere & a train has broke down somewhere else.

Junk Plan C .. Go buy coffee ... Contemplate the arrival of the terrible Day of Judgement & life as a quadriplegic

Blackest of rages

Today your humble correspondent is in London before hopefully getting on a flight this evening. The real p*sser is that last night I was supposed to be on a different flight to Spain for 2 days partridge shooting.

A thousand curses

Wot no salt?

Nangers!

The shortage of salt has forced Wiltshire County Council to cut back on gritting roads as the county prepares for more snowfall tonight

...which is why the A4 east of Marlborough look like this at 0645 this morning...

Forget gorillas in the mist…

Landrovers in the snow are a lot more useful than one of those girlymen Pirus piles of poo!

Has anyone got a set of jump leads for Reader Hugh who might just be needing them!

This morning I have been mainly waiting for a train...

... for some considerable time

Its still a tad snowy down in these yerrrr parrrrts

London this morning

Looks like Al & Leo were right to worry

Its a bit snowy here today

This chap is safe enough, the season just having ended. Damn! However, judging from the hysterical weather warnings that we being issued by the Met Office yesterday, I was expecting woolly mammoths in the top paddock this morning – not the ½ inch dusting on snow that we in fact received. What a nation of girly men we have become

Dirty stop-out

Ummmmmmmmmmm - I seem to recall that even when they put the chairs on the tables...

... we still didn't leave the bar last night. Today is likely to be a little slow. The dinner before hand at the Cinnamon Club was superb- eye wateringly expensive but given that we had been in The Old Star before hand, I didnt really notice quite the extent of the bill until I emptied out my wallet this morning

Ho hum

Pah & double pah!

Before catching the redeye back to Blighty last night, your humble correspondent had supper in the Mandarin Oriental Hotel’s Chinnery Bar. For those of you that are unfamilier with this institution

The Chinnery Bar was originally opened as a Gentleman's club in 1963 and was not opened to women until 1990. It serves traditional colonial cuisine and whiskey.

With a write up like that, you can understand why it is a mandatory stop on any visit to Hong Kong. Tonight, by way of contrast, I shall be staying somewhere in (groan) Leeds. If I were to be uncharacteristically charitable, I would say that such contrasts help me keep a sense of perspective. But I am feeling jet lagged & very very uncharitable. Therefore stuff contrast, I’d much rather still be in the Mando tonight

Kung Hei Fat Choi

& so its back to Hong Kong for a couple of days

This morning...

I should be out shooting pheasants, or still be snoring in my pit. Instead, I am packing a bag...

Its time to get back on the plane again

This morning...

you find me back up north

Its a tough old life

This week, Mrs FM & Daughter are off skiing. This morning, as I get on my train to work, Mrs FM will be enjoying this view from her chalet

Looks like that new deer rifle (in lieu of holiday) is getting closer & closer!

Its even colder this morning that it was yesterday

& I am still blaming Al Gore

I blame Al Gore

This morning when your humble correspondent left home this morning, this is what Disco Dave’s temperature gauge was reading…

If I meet just one of those climate change numpties today, I swear that they are going to get a black eye.

First day back at work

& the snow starts.

Typical

Boxing Day

Today, Family FM have been enjoying a spot of lawlessness down with the Royal Artillery Hunt's Boxing Day meet

& we were not alone - in fact right the way across Blighty...

About 6,000 people attended the Boxing Day hunt in Oxfordshire - the biggest number for 35 years, according to the Couuntryside Alliance

Of course it was all competely legal because no little fluffy foxy woxys were hurt over the course of the day ... we are saving them for a few nights time when we will go out with the lamps & blow 'em to smithereens

Sorry bunny huggers, you can't have it both ways: the red dogs can either take their chances with the hounds or they get an appointment with a 150 grain soft nosed bullet travelling at a little over 2,000 fps.

Merry Christmas

Right dear readers, the fire is lit & the glass is full of Talisker (but not for long).

All that there remains for me to do tonight is to wish you all of you a very Happy Christmas. Now let the feasting commence….

Sithee whippet

Luxury. We used to have to get out of the lake at six o'clock in the morning, clean the lake, eat a handful of 'ot gravel, work twenty hour day at mill for tuppence a month, come home, and Dad would thrash us to sleep with a broken bottle, if we were lucky!

Well, of course, we had it tough. We used to 'ave to get up out of shoebox at twelve o'clock at night and lick road clean wit' tongue. We had two bits of cold gravel, worked twenty-four hours a day at mill for sixpence every four years, and when we got home our Dad would slice us in two wit' bread knife.

This morning you find your humble correspondent one hundred & fifty miles north of the nearest decent gin & tonic. As they say…

They don’t just come in beige

I suppose that it all started with the Volvo 245; short of carting your family about in an actual armoured personnel carrier there was & still is, probably no safer way to move your family around. Indeed, there is a credible school of thought that maintains we could do a lot worse than to issue Volvo’s to units currently on active service in Iraq & Afghanistan. When it comes to solidly built cars, the Volvo is hewn out of the sorts of RSJs that in happier times, they used to build battlecruisers out of. As it was described by Top Gear, since the mid 1970’s, the Volvo estate has been the rubber bumpered totem of stout middle class values. That is probably why, when Family FM moved back to Blightly from Asia in 1998, I bought one. Well not one of those ‘orrible old ones with a tow bracket & a camping club sticker in the rear window that takes half a week to reach 50 miles per hour, but one of these…

… Volvo’s crazy 2nd cousin - the 225 bhp T5 estate.

Now these days, 225 bhp doesn’t sound very much, especially in a car that is the motorised equivalent of the medieval battering ram, but more one Gary Wrong in his ‘hot hatch’ has had a little bit of a shock off the lights, when a fully laden family estate car opens up a big tin of whoooooopass in 7 seconds – the same amount of time that it takes a T5 to go from 0 – 60 mph.

The problem with the T5 was that der Wilhem very quickly twigged how good they were & soon started buying them

As Performance Bikes magazine ruefully concluded, it didn’t matter if you were on the latest Kamikaze Nutter Ba*tard 1100, being chased by a T5 piloted by a police advanced driver, you should be afraid. Very afraid

This morning I have been out in the frost with the labs

A day at the ranges (Part 1)

As some of you have already worked out, we spent last week as guests of the du Toits, enjoying their bounteous hospitality & good company in north Dallas. Now I could at this point spend the rest of this post waxing lyrical about how their dining room table groaned under the weight of a Thanksgiving Dinner of truly biblical proportions: however knowing my loyal readers as I do, I know that you would much rather hear about tables down at the range that were also groaning, but under the weight of firearms, ammunition & other sundry goodies

& so it was that we found ourselves as guests down at the Dallas Pistol Club…& if the very mention of that august institution doesn’t quicken the heart, it should. In fact, in one of his pre-retirement posts, Kim pretty much covered off what we, Family du T & Doc Russia got up to

However from my perspective it did prove a most amusing range day as Mrs FM had never fired a pistol before. So under our hosts supervision, she warmed up on a varity of .22s (Colt, Ruger, Walther, Browning & Kim’s Taurus pump action)

before graduating through 9mm & 357 Magnum (Browning and Smith & Wesson)

& from there, on to 45 Auto

& why did I think that it would be otherwise?? Sometimes I am so stupid, even by my own very shabby standards

Fourth Thursday

To all of you on the left hand side of the pond, may you & your families have a happy Thanksgiving Day

& this morning dear readers you find us in...

Bags packed

After a break of a month or so, its time to get back on the plane again...

... but this time its personal (if you get my drift) so hence the lack of suit carrier. Yeap, time to forget the share price & indeed, whether I will have a job when I get back to the office on Monday, its off to Texas for your humble corrspondent & the war office. Regular readers will know exactly how this is going to end up!

I used to have one of these

However I should state that mine wasn’t in quite such good condition mainly - it did only cost me £40 (in June 1987)

Mine didn’t have a roof – if it started raining you turned the collar of your Barbour up. It didn’t have much of the floor pan either. Oh yes & then there was the matter of no rear box on the exhaust. Sounded good though! You had to remember to keep it topped up with oil owing to the amount that it leaked but it went like the clappers; well at least it felt like it was going quickly when you can see the tarmac through the holes in the floor.

Still, forget all of that, it was summer & I was a nipper that hardly troubled a razor but I had an English sports car. Better still, it is the only car that I have ever owned that I have made money on. It was sold that September to a hitchhiker that I picked up on the A303 for £165. Can’t say fairer than that!

Today Mr FM is still stranded in the dreaded north

Apologies for todays rather thin posting but…

Today your humble correspondent once again to return to the dreaded north & I do mean several hundred miles north of the nearest decent gin & tonic. Oh blackest of rages.

I shall just have to cheer myself up by closing down some factories & other such japery

This morning, I have mainly been walking the dogs

Needless to say, the dogs themselves don’t quite see it like that - they have been out chasing deer & rabbits

As well as snuffling out pheasants & partridges

Time for lunch I think & then time to settle down on the sofa of sloth & watch the rugby

Today, you find your humble correspondent heading for the dreaded north

Yes, its whippets & racing pigeons for me

Tonight Family Free Market will be attending an anti-Catholic rally

Old Reverend Paisley would be proud, however according to The Englishman, such behavior could well constitute an offense under the Terrorism Act 2006

Half Term Week

Last week was half term week & with the exception of your humble corrspondent, the rest of Family FM were down at the beach …

& of course, one of the best things about the coast at this time of year, assuming that it isn’t raining, is that you tend to have the place to yourselves…

Oh yes, & the dogs rather like their trips to the seaside as well

Harvest

Thanks to Peter B for this picture. Given the weather that we have been having over the last day or so, scenes like this seem a long way away at the moment

Home at long long last

This morning dear readers you finally find me at home…

& today, I shall be wearing my wellies for as much of the day as possible. In fact as the year starts to draw to a close, I am going to make a very dangerous prediction – save for a weeks holiday in November that will necessitate getting on a plane, I don’t have to fly again until January. That makes me very very happy. Now if you will excuse me, I am going to find my coat, favourite hat & walk off some of many airmiles.

Bags are packed & its back on the plane again this evening

Back to Hong Kong

Having escaped Beijing, it now falls to your humble corrspondent to spend the weekend in Hong Kong

Back on the plane again...

This morning, you find that you humble correspondent is back on a plane again. Goodbye Wiltshire countryside…

& hello once again to Beijing

Today I shall be mainly listening to...

Today I will be shirking – well not shirking exactly. After the school run I have to pop down to Salisbury. From there it will be cross country to Cirencester for a spot of luncheon

& then on to Monmouthshire where I shall be staying in this fine hostelry tomorrow night, with seven other stout bulldogs

Do you recall all of those 12-bore cartridges … well we fully intend to put them to good use on Friday. Given that I shall be driving through some of the most beautiful & quintessentially English countryside you could ever imagine, I think that it is entirely appropriate to spend the journey listening to this man’s music

Very very loudly.

Not really the grand homecoming...

... but I got home at seven this morning & by three I was down at Greenfields of Salisbury, topping up FM Tower's magazine with a couple of thousand rounds of Eley's excellent VIP Game

Well the season has already started & I have some catching up to do

Mr FM has left Hong Kong

... well at least for a couple of weeks or so

Hungover on a Thursday

Ok, so I have to confess that Wednesday night was a little bit of a big one, what with yesterday being a bank holiday here in Hong Kong. Now when I say a little bit of a big one, to put so sort of perspective on that, when your humble correspondent finally got back to his apartment in an advanced stage of refreshment, it was daylight. Still, it was a bank holiday, so little to do save for recovering on the sofa of sloth right up until it was time to go out for dinner last night.

Now dinner was an altogether lighter affair …a spot of pasta, couple of beers & about a bottle of half decent red per person. This is why, aside from not feeling like a Captain of Industry this morning I staggered into MIX at about eight this morning with evening cell in my body screaming for comfort carbohydrates.

So what was it to be? Bacon sarnie? Toasted bagels? No, when you have a bit of a jippy tummy & the man with the jackhammer is pounding away inside your head, what to really want is some spunky monkey!

Yummy. Yes please. A large spunky monkey for me because that will really settle the stomach.

San Francisco this morning...

Breakfast taken outside ... blah blah blah ... Ferry Building farmers market ... etc etc etc ... time now to head for the airport (again). See you all tomorrow evening (Hong Kong time)

Lunch today...

taken overlooking the 18th at Pebble Beach

In fact there is no way that this photo (taken on my BlackBerry) does justice to how completely beautiful the scene was. I know that at the best of times I am a cynical of sod but I was left completely gobsmacked. Forget St Andrews, way too many Scots & its always raining – for the golfers among you, trust me when I say that I cant see how it would ever get any better than this.

& by way of comparison, here is how it looks on competition days…

Thursday evening

Back in San Francisco

Whiskey drinking time starts shortly!

Thursday morning breakfast

at Mel's Diner in Sacramento

Having got in to town on the red-eye last night, this is just what the doc ordered! Yum!

Wednesday mornings view...

... from the Hilton Hotel at Chicago O'Hare Airport

Ahhhhhh, the glamour of international travel !

Back on the plane (again)

As I can currently see this building

it must mean that yout humble corrspondent is once again in San Francisco

As its Monday morning

my bags are packed

Time to get back on the plane

Back to work & back on the plane

So Boy went back to school today & after a break of a month, you humble correspondent got back on a plane. Beijing this afternoon dear readers

& as you can see from the pic, shutting down all industry & banning most of the traffic from the streets really does clear the air. No doubt the Guardianistas will be demanding the imposition of similar measures immediately.

Heavy horse farming

Tonight I cant sleep. I have no idea why, save for the fact that I was doing hard sums until late. Anyway, its now a lot later. Rootling around online, I came across this picture taken in October 1939, showing farm workers taking a break from drilling winter wheat while there horses eat their midday meal.

The significance of the picture is that it was taken about a mile from The Englishman’s Castle & if you look closely, you can just make out his tractor in the background

Get back on the plane

Well it has been an entire week since I was last on a plane, so it is somwwhat enivitable that that has to change today ...

So forget wandering across the fields with a rifle or popping down to the clay range to shoot off a few boxes - this evening its back to being Larry Long-Haul. Curses!

I feel the need, the need for leeeeeeeeed

This morning, the redoubtable Mrs FM & your humble correspondent have been to the clay range to give the Berettas a good rousting. Whilst my 12-bore Model 686 (on the right in the picture below)

is still a wonderful wonderful gun to shoot with, Mrs FM’s 20-bore Silver Pigeon is just about the most delightful, light, fast handling shotgun that I have ever used. If I had my time again, it is probably the only shotgun that I’d ever use.

Anyway, the War Office’s shooting is coming along nicely – she is currently connecting about 50% of the time. However, when she connects, it is slap bang in the middle of the pattern stuff. So as soon as she stops thinking about what she is doing, starts to relax & shoot instinctively, that average will come up worryingly quickly. Grrrrrrrrrr!

Other than that, I feel it incumbent upon me to point out the gratuitous matching of cap, jacket & shirt…

…sometimes, just sometimes, she is such a girl!

Today, I have mainly been...

Taking the dogs for a walk & the enivitable swim this morning

followed by a trip over to The Englishman's Castle this afternoon

for a little noise creation

followed by a few cups of tea, round at mein hosts. This evening before supper, I shall wander across the field to the pub for a couple of jars of Wadsworths' finest. Racing around the globe is all very well, but this really is my sort of a day.

The final leg

& this evening its time to get on the plane for the big home run. Even my bag

that British Airways managed to errrrrr misplace between London & Amsterdam, in the middle of last month turned up up in Hong Kong yesterday evening. Anyway, its now time to go to the airport

& no, I haven't managed to escape yet

In fact today, I shall be mainly in Chongqing

Now all I have to say about Chongqing is that the locals take their food quite seriously

Hot pot is Chongqing's local culinary specialty. Tables in hotpot restaurants usually contain a central vat (or pot) where food ordered by the customers is boiled/deep fried. As well as beef, pork, lotus and other vegetables, items such as pig's kidney, brain; duck's bowels; and cow's stomach are often added to the pot.

oh, & one more thing ... its twin city in the USA is ... wait for it ... Detroit.

No, please not now

If you recall dear readers, at the end of last week a made this little quip about my somewhat hectic travel plans

(sound of mobile phone ringing): "Is that Mr Free Market? Colonel Trautman here ..."

which over the last 3 weeks have basically included a week across Europe, a week in Singapore & a week in the Middle East. Well, I started today with the prospect of ten clear days in Hong Kong ahead of me. That was at about 0830. By lunchtime, that plan had been well & truly scraped as guess who was standing in my office ???? Yep, you guessed right – tomorrow morning its time to get back on that plane again

Bank on the plane gang - Part 15

& so it finishes: the final leg or should I say couple of legs ... Muscat to Dubai

where I had a seven hour stop over ...

& then on to Hong Kong. The best part is that looking at my schedule, I dont have to get on another aircraft for a week

(sound of mobile phone ringing) "Is that Mr Free Market, Colonel Trautman here..."

Back on the plane gang - Part 14

Despite my generally poor mood, yesterday morning started reasonably enough or should I say, as well as can be expected given my enforced abstinence the night before. I made it to my 0830 meeting in Kuwait City on time & that somewhat surprisingly went much better than was expected. From there, it was a short ride down to the airport to catch the shuttle down to Bahrain & my next meeting.

OK, so the flight got cancelled & the next flight was delayed by two hours but I’m still sanguine even though I was stranded in frankly not the greatest terminal building, no prospect of a few little drinkie-poos to pass the time & for company, a Chinese workaholic & Herman the German … who talked at some length & in detail about how pure the Icelandic gene poll is. Trust me when I say that time passes very very slowly in these circumstances.

Anyway, our aircraft finally arrived & off we set, trundling down the runway. In fact we where travelling at a fair old lick when suddenly the pilot throttled back, applied full reverse thrust & with squealing tyres we came to a juddering halt. Of course, this being a Gulf Air flight, very few people had actually bother to stow anything in the overhead lockers & those that had were properly secured so in an instant, the cabin was filled with cases & assorted debris … shoes, bags & small children all piling up at the front of the aircraft. The locals collectively started their “enchalla” routine & even your humble correspondent stopped worrying about his perilous financial position for a few seconds.

Apparently, just before the pilot was about to ‘rotate’ (I assume that this is something that he & the co-pilot do with the trolley tarts) we suffered a cabin de-pressurisation, which is nice. So we taxi back to the terminal & sit there while we wait for repairs to be undertaken.

After about an hour of so, my general level of boredom was relived by the aircraft’s smoke alarms going off & the cabin filling with smoke. This was to the cue for a lot of people to run up & down the aisles with fire extinguishers & a lot more “enchallas”. It transpired that one of the local had gone for a crafty smoko in the Benghazi & having set off the smoke alarms, did the sensible thing & threw the still burning butt into the pan into the waste tissue basket. Doh!

& we went to all that trouble to “liberate” these people? Tomorrow is the last day & then I’m outta here. Right now however, I need to go & catch my next flight

Back on the plane gang - Part 13

Tonight dear readers you find me in miserable mood. Nearly three years ago, we buried a very dear (military) friend who was tragically killed in a parachuting accident. Today is his eldest son’s eighteenth birthday & I know how terribly proud he was & would have been if the Law of Averages hadn’t conspired against him one sunny September afternoon.

My general malaise isn’t helped by the fact the Daily Toerag has taken it upon itself to publish more gory details of the suicide of another friend, Sgt Richard Fuller.

All of this is made many times worse by the fact that tonight I am in Kuwait City

& I cant even get a bl**dy drink! Oh darkest of rages.

Back on the plane gang - Part 12

This morning dear readers, you find your humble correspondent in Abu Dhabi.

It’s been some six years since I was last in the Middle East & certainly my last visit comprised nothing more that three hours respite in the transit lounge a Dubai airport i.e. a bout of remorseless drinking in between two long flights that funnily enough seemed to comprise an obscene amount of drinkie-poos from the trolley. So anyway, here we all are, in a series of meetings that will at very very least, take us around the Gulf until Wednesday lunchtime.

Of course, commercial confidences preclude me ‘fessing up’ to my nefarious little plan suffice to say that the job I was sent to Hong Kong to do has completely turned on its head & the grande fromage has flown out from London to try & understand why exactly, instead of shipping boatloads of bish bosh back to dear Blighty, I have the buying hat on … just as the Asian bourses start to do a Kittinger. Its not that in commercial terms, deals in Asia can get flipped on their head in a nano-second, but as Old China Hands know, a Hong Kong Minute is a bit like the proverbial New York Minute … just a whole load faster.

So, today could be a little bit of a Day of Reckoning. At the moment I am not going to be sure if it’s a case of “somebody’s going to emergency & somebody’s going to jail”, but if the creek don’t rise, the dam don’t burst & at least one wheel stays on the global economy for just a few more weeks…

Back on the plane gang – Part 11

Since my last update on my little aerial odyssey, a few things have happened:

a) I finally got back to Hong Kong

b) This is more than my missing bag has managed to do. Thanks to British Airways, it is now back at Heathrow (maybe)

c) Upon returning to Hong Kong late on Thursday night, as I got off the plane & switched on my BlackBerry, new orders arrived which is why I have spent most of today on another aircraft (well two aircraft, if we are going to be didactic)

d) & the boss is also in the air today, making a 6 hour flight to meet with me … but more on that tomorrow morning...

Back on the plane gang - Part 10

Tonight, I have put my liver on the line, for the greater corporate good in here

This is no longer any fun, even by my very shabby standards

Back on the plane gang - Part 9

Last night, my evening started with a few cocktails here...

followed by a very long, very excellent but very liquid supper...

& then a couple of quick scoops on my way back to the hotel...

& finished for the evening with a cleansing ale.

This morning dear readers, we are not feeling like a Captain of Industry

Back on the plane gang - Part 8

& this evening, you find me in Singapore ...

with my luggage. Not I will add, with the kit that British Airways lost last week, but with the replacement luggage I have bought since. Still, right now I will settle for that. Hostilities with BA re-start tomorrow morning

Back on the plane gang - Part 7

Well, your humble correspondent actually made it home for some 20 hours before another car came to collect me & take me to Heathrow…

This is why I am spending my Saturday evening, not in the pub, but in another airport lounge

Back on the plane gang - Part 6

Still in London ...

still haven't managed to get home ...

& no, British Airways still haven't found my missing bag

Back on the plane gang - Part 5

This morning, I am back in Blighty…

& BTW, no, I didn’t even manage to get home last night as I had a dinner with what we shall politely refer to as investors (frankly, they looked like a right pair to me) & I ended up in a hotel sometime in the small wee hours.

The funny thing is that although I normally work in London, being currently based in Hong Kong means that this doesn’t feel like ‘home’ … it’s just another city.

As for my missing bag, yesterday afternoon, BA confessed that they didn’t know where it is. That shouldn’t really come as any surprise!

Back on the plane gang - Part 4

Accoding to BA (the worlds favourite airline), my luggage is now on its way back to FM Towers. Your humble correspondent however, arrived in Copenhagen late last night

Back on the plane gang - Part 3

Today, I shall be mostly be in Zurich

My luggage on the other hand might be on its way to Amsterdam ... or it may still be in London. British Airways don't seem to know. Utter utter nangers!

Back on the plane gang - Part 2

This morning you find your humble correspondent in Amsterdam

My bag however, & in so far as I can ascertain, is still at Heathrow … somewhere. May be. British Airways, still the world’s favourite airline? I think not.

My shareholders meeting starts in about an hour; currently I am

a) Wearing yesterdays shirt & a pair of jeans
b) Our shares are currently trading at a substantial discount to Net Asset Value

This has not been a good start to the week

Back on the plane gang - Part 1

This is the view from my bedroom in Hong Kong, looking west over Sheung Wan that I took last Thursday …

& this is the view looking east across the field to the village from my bedroom at home that I took this afternoon.

Out of the two, I know where I would much rather be. Sadly, in an hours time a car is going to arrive in the farmyard & once more whisk me away to Heathrow. This time its not straight back to Cathay, oh no, that would be way too simple. There is a huge tranche of travel & general b*ggering about to do first.

Today is going to be a sofa sort of day

Last night went on rather longer than common sense dictated & whilst it wasnt quite this bad...

... today will be mainly spent grafted to the sofa of sloth

Reasons to be cheerful: Part 43

My hotel's shirt service...

Starched, folded & nicely boxed. Sometimes, just sometimes, living out of a suitcase isn't so bad!

Nobody ever lost their job buying IBM ... just their sanity

Firstly, apologises for the quality of the picture at the top of this post – my camera in my BlackBerry doesn’t have enough picture definition to cope with interior shots & glass topped desks. However as you can see, currently I have two reasonable healthy laptops which makes a nice change.

Some of you that drop by here on a regular basis might recall that recently your humble correspondent has been in what could be flippantly referred to as hardware hell. It all started when I closed down my laptop before getting on a redeye flight to London from Dallas. The next morning when I got to the office, half a dozen double espressos & a few smokos got me going but simply nothing would kick start Larry Laptop (aka Larry Doorstop because that’s all it was good for).

With customary optimism given that said Doorstop was under a year old & still under the manufacturers warranty, more naively than a Liberal Party canvasser, I thought that it would be a reasonably simple task to get the damn fixed … oh foolish child. There ensured a six week titanic battle of wills & abusive phone calls between Mr Reticence here & IBM Customer Support.

But here’s my point – an IBM is a premium product. My ultra cute little mega portable cost the thick end of £1,500. That’s a lot of money in my book, but when things go wrong as inevitably they do, a little help in getting them fixed would be very much appreciated. However in IBM World, the two words customer & support are mutually exclusive which is why firstly I went out & bought another laptop & secondly I sent the following letter moments before the Restraining Order kicked in …

Dear [Mr Corporate Pinhead]

Yours Sincerely

Needless to say, the stock response from IBM was that when the new recovery disks arrived (& that would take 10 days), all would be well. So I arrive in Hong Kong & had a word with the IT chappie in the office. My laptop came back completely repaired the next morning.

So to the directors of IBM, I put this to you. Achieve cost savings by firing your entire UK customer service team – they are about as much use as a sick headache. One Hong Kong Chinese techie got more done overnight than your company achieved in six weeks.

Sleep

I never can’t sleep … or at least if I can’t, a few sensible measures of Dr Free Market’s Universal Embrication will send me happily on my way. May be over the last week or so I have crossed too many time zones but for the last three nights, I’ve woken up at between 3-4 am …& that’s wide awake can't go back to sleep awake. Looks like its time to go chemical

My rear cross-member is rusting … don’t worry, they all do that sir

When Jesse Stone wrote his twelve bar blues classic Shake, Rattle & Roll, he wasn’t thinking about rock & roll, he was in fact writing about the venerable Land Rover. Bits fall off them; they leak water in & oil out. As for the runners that the rear windows sit in, there is just the right amount of moss that should be growing in them. The clutch peddle squeaks & the window winders work very very occasionally. Then there’s the smell: the delicate blend of old Labrador, smelly wellies & ditch water. Perfect

As regular readers will know Family FM will drive nothing else – after all, think of all the money that you save in car valeting when once a year, all your have to do is pressure hose the interior. Seriously. A few gallons of water, a firm yard brush & you are go to go in 15 minutes.

So anyway …

Workers at the Land Rover plant have met Prince Charles to mark the 60th anniversary of the company. The manufacturer, based in Solihull, West Midlands, produced its first vehicle in April 1948

… & to be honest, the design hasn’t moved on a lot since then, mainly because they got it right the first time round. Rather like an English ‘best gun’, future generations can try to improve upon it but for all their time & effort, all they do is frig around at the edges.

Now, there as those of you that live in countries where the Defender (to use its current name) is not currently available - not only does my heart go out to you but can I humbly suggest that you take the head of whichever agency has banned their import out the back & give them a proper kicking because you are missing out on the most capable 4x4 ever built. Without exception. Yes yes yes, you can go & buy something with a V hemi cross flow head Okie Kokie 2000 thousand thingy engine, take it down to the custom shop & spend squillions getting some cross country capability bolted onto it … or you can buy a Landie, drive out of the showroom & break down tackle just about any terrain in the world in its OEM specification. The biggest limitation to a Landrover’s cross country capability is the driver’s skill … & of course how brave he (or she) is feeling.

Oh yes & they look right. Yes I know that Fulham Farmers & the Home Counties crowd buy them in black these days, but that t’aint natural. They come in green or blue. Everything else is an aberration … a bit like the colour schemes of every other 4x4 manufacturer you care to mention.

When we are off out for a days shooting & one of the guns turns up in the latest Bitsaremushi Ruffty Tuffty replete with chrome bumpers & a surfeit of go faster spot lights, Mrs FM has been known to mutter darkly that they are not proper people & then go and get the heavy duty tow rope ready because before the end of the day, sure as sh*ts brown, she will be pulling them out of the gloop.

To my mind this well known picture says it all

… anything that was good enough for the stoutest of stout bulldogs is certainly good enough for me. & if you are going to complain that a Landrover has been left behind by more up to date designs, go & buy that piece of Jap plastic, it probably has a special hook in the cabin to hang your handbag from

San Fran to Hong Kong ... via LA & London

Not that I have been spending a lot of time on flights lately but today (just as summer has arrived) its time to pack my bags again ... this time for some months

& head for Hong Kong. Say farewell dear blighty & hellaiiirrrrr to fleshpots of Asia

The tale of how we ended up hungover like swine, went to the wrong airport & nearly never made it to LA will just have to wait for another day & a different bottle of scotch. Asia's steamy delights beckon

Stuck in San Fran

Its 0715 & I have a world class hangover. Today is going to be a long old day.

Back to San Fran

I checked into my hotel an hour or so ago

I seem to recall that the weather was just as grey when I was last here, just over a month ago

Hangovers & flights

So I could tell up that the weekend was spent at Badminton Horse Trials but if the truth be known, I never got further than the beer tent. I took this picture at about seven thirty on Saturday morning not long before my first pint …

Anyway, today is a Bank Holiday but that doesn’t mean that there is any peace for the wicked & terminally hungover. In a few hours a car will come to collect me & whisk me off to Heathrow.

Another week in the States beckons …

FILTH 2: Return to the (former) colonies

So 2 weeks ago, there I was, comfortably ensconced in the BA First Class lounge, little drinkie-poos in one hand, when the phone goes. Damn, it’s the boss was my initial reaction but then remembering that for some lamentable reason it was only my first come back sharpener I took the call.

Fifteen minutes later, it transpires that immediately after my next little West Coast junket which is next week, I have to get myself on a flight going the other way & head for Harry Honkers.

Five months unaccompanied. Yippeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee! Wanchai … fi de la, ummmmgoy sai

Well, that’s not completely true, Family FM will be doing a couple of trips out during that time if for no other reason than the nippers, having grown up in the darkest West Country, should find that HK will completely & utterly put the zap on their little heads. There are few things more satisfying than comprehensively trashing your children’s comfort zone! Larkin was right all along.

Still, having left in ’97 & only done two shortish trips back their since, I am quite looking forward to it, even though weather wise it will be the worst time of year. Add to that, the fact that I will have to spend a fair amount of time up country, the beer in the many bars along the Fong will be ice cold & there are deals to be done: it should make for an interesting summer.

Bestest of all however is the fact that last weekend I actually mowed the lawns at home – a job I so completely & utterly detest. By the time I get back home, the grass should just about have stopped growing. You really can't say fairer than only having to have to cut the grass once this year!

& hardware hell continues

This week, posting (even by my own shabby standards) has been somewhat erratic mainly because this is what is wrong with my laptop …

1. Initial attempt to repair boot sector by booting from XP disk and using the Recovery Console tools "fixboot" and fixmbr". The system
would not boot as it required a third-party driver which was not included with the XP distro. The system would BSOD with an Inaccessible Boot Device error code (0x0000007B).

5. BIOS disk diagnostics would run for 20 seconds or so and then stop with a "Read Error".

6. DOS 7 FDISK would not create a new disk partition, it would attempt to check the integrity of the drive and fail.

9. An attempt to update the BIOS also failed using the latest iso, 7buj24uc.iso, (from here: http://www-307.ibm.com/pc/support/site.wss/document.do?sitestyle=lenovo&lndocid=MIGR-63145) and this failed with the same error.

I think that that means that larry laptop is well & truly …!

Singapore

They stepped into the canoe; the little girl-daughter came with them; and the Man took his kris--a curving, wavy dagger with a blade like a flame,--and they pushed out on the Perak river. Then the sea began to run back and back, and the canoe was sucked out of the mouth of the Perak river, past Selangor, past Malacca, past Singapore, out and out to the Island of Bingtang, as though it had been pulled by a string.

from The Crab that played with the Sea, Rudyard Kipling

This morning dear readers your humble correspondent has woken to find himself in Singapore

Hot? Yes, its damned hot. Ten years ago when I lived in Hong Kong I was used both heat & humidity ... but these days sadly not.

The same of this trip is that it is only a flying visit is every sense of thw word ( I am on the late flight back to London tonight) after a day of back to back meeting which I can already feel will go nowhere.

Having been covering the fall of Singpore in the "On This Day" section quite recently, I have had the opportunity to really look round & do my usual tour of war memorials etc

However, it probably is just as well that my schedule doesn't allow me time to do all of that because Mrs FM was both born & spent the early part of her likfe out here, & I am definately not forgiven for not bringing her on this trip. Oh yes sirreeeeeeee, the dog house beckons

Another day, another flight: time to get back on the plane again

Ship me somewheres east of Suez, where the best is like the worst,
Where there aren’t no Ten Commandments an’ a man can raise a thirst
from Mandalay, Rudyard Kipling

Its Sunday afternoon & instead of sleeping off a decent lunch, I'm packing a bag again

The only consolation is ... just think of the airmiles.

No Aga is complete without a slobrador to sleep in front of it

Laptops, corruption & digital disaster

So the geekie-techie bloke phones up your humble correspondent first thing this morning & tells me

you know when I said that your laptop would be completely repaired & back to you by nine o’clock today, well …

so as sure as new taxes follow the election of a Labour government, with a certain sickening inevitability, a whole litany of binary woes are laid before me. In fact it transpires that my head partition (whatever that might be when it’s a home) is even more corrupt that Ken Livingstone’s re-election campaign & judging by the dead tree media over the last few days, that really does take some doing as it transpires that Red Ken has been receiving more bungs (ooooooooophs, sorry, I meant previously undisclosed campaign donations ) than errrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr the rest of the Liebore Party.

OK, fair enough, worse things might happen when you are at sea than your laptop dying on you … but when you guarantee me that something is going to be fixed, call me old fashioned but I expect my laptop to come back fixed & not receive the response that company policy is that

you cant go further than the hard drive

Cant go further than the bl**dy hard drive???? In my admittedly warped & twisted opinion, that’s a little like a young lady checking into the hotel with you & then when you get to the first button of her blouse, suddenly re-discovering her self-esteem. I thought that you had promised me that I was going to get my computer fixed & that in the highly unlikely event that it couldn’t be fixed that I wouldn’t have to pay a penny … not be presented with my still broken machine an invoice for nearly 50 quid.

Anyway, it’s a comparatively new laptop, so it was time to instigate Plan B & I phoned the IBM’s helpline. Whilst this might seem a very sensible course of action, trust me when I say that this is something that you really really don’t want to do unless you are in the office as by the time that you finally get connected to someone that purports to be able to help you, the cost of the call will be larger than than the average investment bank bale out. Again, is it just me or do the people that supposedly ‘work’ in call centres work of geological time scales?

So finally I get put through to Billy (a gentleman of Scottish extraction) & who in a previous existence peddled snake oil because he has a disk that he is going to send me which all I have to do is put it in the disk drive …
chant the mythical incantations …
& all will be made better in less time than it takes young William to get into a fight after seven pints of heavy on a Friday night.

Fantastic says I, & with all the naivety of an undergraduate in a lapdancing bar, I inquire as to whether said disk could be biked round to my office. Oh foolish foolish man … apparently the supply of the magic disks has been outsourced to a company in Bratislava & they take five to ten days to arrive!

All of ‘em, I want them dead … I want all of these people doing the lamppost tango right now. No matter how statistically improbable it may seem, I want them all to suffer debilitating brain aneurisms this morning. If I could buy Ebola from Sainburys I would be buying family packs of it to mail to each & every one of these people. I would be first in the queue at the Post Office when it opens this morning Jiffy packs in hand …. least I would be if the Government hadn’t closed them all down.

Get on the Plane, Get off the Plane – Part 11

Well dear readers, this should be my final post from the American odyssey that has been my last couple of weeks. Actually, that is not true exactly, there is actually lots to come about this trip. However, as I type this, the sun is blazing down on Dallas Fort Worth Airport but a phone call to Mrs FM revealed that the Free Markettes had been making snowmen this morning – looks like I wont be needing my sunglasses for a bit then.

Needless to say, a little bit of snow has caused London’s Heathrow Airport to grind to a complete halt but what the hell, when I checked in my luggage half an hour ago, I figured that it was probably the last time I was going to see my cases if the news about the new baggage systems at Heathrow is to be believed. This is a great shame as they as stuffed full of telescopic sights, rifle magazines for my Rugers & a veritable pile of gun porn.

Whilst I have been to the States many times, I have never made it to Texas before. Now over the next few days I hope to be able to find time to write a little more about the experience, but lets just say, between now & when I land in London, I will be trying very hard to work out how to wangle another trip.

Right now however “when I get back to London” seems to be somewhat in doubt because of the few flakes of snow that have fallen in the UK, the whole place has gone to rat sh1t & my flight has been delayed. Normally I get really pissed (in the American sense of the word) when this sort of thing happens, but the nice ladies in the British Airways lounge have found me a packet of smokos, bottle of whiskey & somewhere where I can avail myself of the pleasures of both . Therefore dear readers, if you will excuse me, I now intend to get thoroughly pissed (in the British sense of the word) while I wait for my flight; See you all (but probably not my baggage) at some stage tomorrow.

Get on the Plane, Get off the Plane – Part 10

Well this morning dear readers it is time for your humble correspondent to leave San Francisco get back on the plane again for the penultimate leg of this trip.

All I am going to say about my final port of call is that the firearms free phase of my visit to the US will be ending when I land

Get on the Plane, Get off the Plane – Part 9

It’s getting late & I’m drunk. Before I go to bed/pass out on my hotel room floor I suspect I will get a whole lot drunker. I am drunk just because. I have about 36 hours left to do in San Francisco before the penultimate leg of this trip commences. As the company’s balance sheet sinks into the waters of the bay as I proceed to methodically drain the mini-bar

here is a little game that you can play called Monday Supper Time Fun

Have supper (alone). Go to the sort of place where a steak, 2 glasses of admittedly very decent red wine & a double espresso costs US$ 100. Eat at the bar & ensure that to your left are couple of meeejar types & to your right is some bloke from New York who seems more concerned with waving his Rolex about than holding a knife & fork correctly.

Sit down at said bar & read May/June’s edition of American Handgunner while you eat your supper. Enjoy the spectacle of other customers try to surreptitiously edge away from you during the course of said meal!

Get on the Plane, Get off the Plane – Part 8

Get on the Plane, Get off the Plane – Part 7

This morning dear readers I wake to find myself both hungover & back in San Francisco

It looks like packing my sunglasses was a little, shall we say, optimistic?

Get on the Plane, Get off the Plane – Part 6

Frankly dear readers, I have no idea where on earth I am this morning ...

My schedule says Sacramento but it could be the dark side of the moon for all I know.

Get on the Plane, Get off the Plane – Part 5

Judging by this mornings view, I must now be in San Francisco ...

... but I no longer care. Need coffee!

(Sorry, thats a really bad photo; even my BlackBerry is 'lagged' to billy-o)

Get on the Plane, Get off the Plane – Part 4

This was the view from our lunch time table.

Sadly, our schedule didnt allow us time to really appreciate it or anything else come to that ... & even though today has been conducted at break neck speed I still missed my next flight which is why I am currently in another airport lounge waiting for the next service in 3 hours time. Grrrrrrrrrrr!

Get on the Plane, Get off the Plane – Part 3

This morning, I enjoy a slightly different vista from my hotel room

I think its safe to assume that I'm now in Manhatten

Get on the Plane, Get off the Plane – Part 2

This is the view from my hotel in Boston. Apparently it is just

steps away from exciting Boston attractions, including Faneuil Hall/Quincy Market, Boston Convention & Exhibition Center, North End, Chinatown, Beacon Hill and a plethora of historical attractions such as the Boston Tea Party Museum and Freedom Trail

Right now, all I want is a whiskey & my pit ... & I'll take them in any order

Get on the Plane, Get off the Plane – Part 1

Its quarter to nine on Easter Bank Holiday morning & you find me sitting in the BA lounge at Heathrow …

Once more your humble correspondent gives a masterclass in how to destruction test a marriage!

Good Friday

This morning I have mainly been out with the dogs...

Women: You can’t live with ‘em & you can’t kill ‘em (Part 43)

Mrs FM is a living exponent of the old adage “look after your kit & your kit with look after you”. Indeed, the manner in which for example, her several cubic hectares of sailing equipment is stowed would gladden the heart of even the most tattooed & rum sodden Chief Petty Officer. Think of any type of a sail & I can almost guarantee you that we have at least three sitting in the grain store - cleaned, loosely folded, in a correctly marked sailbag & stowed in the order that they will be needed. Her neatness extends to just about every aspect life in FM Towers. Even shirts are put in my shirt draw in order so that the most recently laundered are at the bottom of the pile. When I am feeling brave, insanely brave, I sometimes throw both caution & the continued use of my legs to the wind & take a shirt from the bottom of the draw …hellfire & damnation follows as surely as a Labour Government raises the tax burden.

Maybe it’s a function of having had a Forces upbringing.
Maybe its because she was sent away to boarding school at the age of eight. Maybe, just maybe, it’s because of some deep rooted dark personality disorder brought on by being a navy brat who was sent away at a young age but at times, all this neatness boarders upon the creepily obsessive.

Numbed as I now am, by twelve years of marital bliss (or is that martial bliss?) I these days tend to take a more alcohol-fuelled & sanguine view, generally from the sofa of sloth, of this sort of anally retentive behaviour, regarding it as the normal reaction that a very organised person must feel, every time that she looks at her blithering shambles that is her husband.

But there is an upside to these tutonic levels of personal administration. Because she is so organised & is genetically predisposed to look after things, Mrs FM’s kit tends to have a half life longer than the average Carlos Santana guitar solo. That is true pretty much across the board with one notable exception … watches.

Whilst everything else in her procession lasts for years & years, Mrs FM breaks watches like Gordon Brown breaks election pledges. Not cheap watches mind you, decent ones to boot. She is the watchmakers’ nemesis … actions, cases, faces, straps buckles & clasps … the whole nine yards. She hasn’t so much as destroyed them as left a wake of carnage & devastation that could cause the entire population of Switzerland to question the very basis of its timekeeping achievements. She is a one women Hiroshima, vaporising chronograph & wristwatch without distinction & without mercy. This is way, at any given moment, the top draw of my office desk will have on average at least two watches in it, waiting to go for repair. Indeed, many of the jewellers that I have used over the years have taken early retirement off the back of our annual spend.

So this year, I finally decided to call an end to horological madness & with a birthday forthcoming, buy a really decent robust watch that would endure the slings, arrows, seawater & mud inflicted upon it by its owner. After all, the received wisdom is that if you buy a good watch it should save you money in the long run. & so

Research commenced …

Expert opinion was sought…

Learned advice was heeded …

& I ended up buying a second hand ladies Breitling.

It seemed in good order. Even Mr Breitling said it was a good’un … & there I was thinking to myself that this was going to be not just a winner, but a move that would receive plaudits from even the syndicate to credit card companies that finance our lives.

Anyway, the fateful day arrives & the gift is handed over. The box is opened
& written right across her face was that ‘look’ …

All husbands know what I mean by that ‘look’. It’s the look that will plunge even the cheeriest spouse into the desolate & bottomless pit of despair. Sometime later on that evening it transpires that what she wants for her birthday isn’t a decent watch … no sir. What she really really wants for her birthday is a new pair of Wellingtons. I give up. I really really do. For moments such as this there are only two things; booze & Ebay.

Wet Sundays

Its so wet & windy here this afternoon, even the dogs have stopped demanding walks & have taken to lurking hiding in the playroom

Time to light the woodburner methinks

Sgt Richard Fuller

Kim on the subject of British journalism yesterday

The Brits excel at “gotcha” journalism—whether it’s the political sort, or at the “Look who’s showing their naughty bits!” nonsense at horrible outlets like the Daily Mail.

Take for example this story in yesterday’s edition of the Mail

The head of security for the Duchess of Cornwall was yesterday found dead after apparently shooting himself at his home. Police Sergeant Richard Fuller, 55, was married with three grownup children.

If you can be bothered to read the article, this lowlife rag goes on to make cheap jibes at the Duchess of Cornwall in the same piece … which is nice.

I knew Richard Fuller & consider myself fortunate to have been able to call him a friend. In the picture below he is on the left, scoping the moor where we regularly hunted deer & grouse together

I don’t even know where to start, as his 23 years of service speak for themselves.

This evening there is a howling gale in the Vale & I am soaked to the skin having been standing at the bottom of the paddock for the last hour, raging at everything.

Late night phone calls

(its late, in the lobby bar there are nine people, mainly couples. The pianist is playing Beetles numbers. A mobile phone rings…)

FM: ‘allo

Colleague: Where are you?

FM: In the lobby bar

Colleague: Which hotel?

FM: The Mando

Colleaugue: Errrrr yes, but which one?

FM: Munich

Colleague: We’re in Munster

Forget "doing it for the children", just arm them now

Via Kim

The rise of violent crime was highlighted yesterday when it was revealed that children as young as eight have been caught with guns.

This photograph was taken three years ago, when Boy was seven years old. It was a beautiful evening & with a couple of hours of daylight left, we thought that we would the opportunity to go & pot some rabbits before supper.

Down in these yerrrr parrrrrrts, this is pretty much normal behaviour. In fact I simply cannot exactly recall at what age I did the same with my father. However (via The Englishman) it would seem that the GFWs don’t want our children to be taught how to safely handle legally owned weapons …

Did you realise there is no minimum age requirement for a shotgun licence, and that children as young as 10 are being issued with them?

However, I don’t feel comfortable about this, do you? Anti-gun campaigners do not feel children are mature enough to use a powerful weapon. I would be interested to know how many young shotgun holders have been involved in accidents. Do the police ask why pre-teens want a shotgun? I would like to see the data on that too.

Whilst my heart is uplifted to learn that in Suffolk alone, 182 under-16s have received Shotgun Certificates, this sort of thing really causes me to spend hours, sitting in the dark, stroking my Remington while whispering softly to her soon soon my precious, soon soon. In fact, as regular readers will know, this sort of rage is normally followed by your humble correspondent heading straight down to the gun shop to buy himself another little something (once the urge to head for the clock tower has receded). But not this time however, oh no. This time I am going to do something a little different…

The big irony in all of this is that Boy, now ten years old, doesn’t actually need a Shotgun Certificate to shoot on a regular basis & shoot on a regular basis he certainly does. However, thanks to the likes of Ms Seymour (someone who labels herself as a Member of the Chartered Institute of Public Relations , Press Consultant, Journalist, Political & PR Blogger), that is about to change. If young people being approved by their local Firearms Licensing Officer to have a Certificate causes such PSH, there is clearly only one course of action open.

Looks like I will be filling in the forms this weekend!

Yours, aye

Mr FM
(someone who when he is sober enough to remember, wants to see EVERY ONE one of Her Majesty's law abiding subjects armed & trained in the use of those arms)

Happier times

They say you can find just about anything that you want on the interest & yes, even that. Anyway, over the weekend, The Englishman found your humble correspondent this, which I purchased using an online account …

a photograph taken in 1935, of what is now Free Market Towers.

If I were to take a photograph from the same place tomorrow morning, it would be remarkable that which the exception of power & telephone lines, very very little has changed.

& yet everything has changed.

& no, this wasn't me last week

... however a few years ago, it might well have been

Contributor TDB thinks that he heard a rumour that this chap was looking for his snowmobile after a blizzard. Sadly, we will probably never know

Home at last

A round trip of 1,541 miles ...
at an average of 60.2 mph
consuming diesel at a rate of a gallon every 25.8 miles

& best of all, apparently Disco Dave produced 666.46 kg of Carbon Dioxide: how many drowning baby polar bears is that?

& so it comes to an end ...

Well, we will ski until tea time ...

... then throw all of our kit into the back of Disco Dave II & then head for home. Pah! There is nearly nothing worse than leaving the mountians, espcially when they are covered in snow.

Ski issues

I take my hat of to the guy in the ski rental shop … but how did he know I have such a puerile sense of humour???

After 3 days of incessant giggling your humble correspondent could stand it no more & yesterday morning, knocked them in for a pair of Rossignols

It was pointed out over breakfast that today is some sort of a day of note …

Guess who is in the doghouse again?

Family FM is still away skiing

& the holiday starts

The view of Mont Blanc from our apartment. It tough work I know ... but someone has to do it. The forecast for tomorrow ... sunny, -6 degs oh & for those of you that are still reading ... the snow is excellent.

Gout

So its not the port that causes it then?

Sugary drinks have been blamed for a surge in cases of the painful joint disease gout.
Men who consume two or more sugary soft drinks a day have an 85% higher risk of gout compared with those who drink less than one a month, a study suggests.

In that case, I had better get a couple of half decent bottles up from the cellar, ready for this evening

Breakfast in Tiffany’s Chengdu

I know that it wasn’t up to the Breakfast Bloggers usual standards & a million miles away from the chocolate chip muffin I had had in the Mandarin Hotel the day before but to my mind, a breakfast such as this

comprising caffeine, nicotine & alcohol (that isn’t water in the glass on the left), has all the essential food groups. The night before however was even better but apologies for the picture quality

served on a bed of red & green chillies, strips of pan fried swan. I love Sichuan cookery.

Still flooded

I got home this morning only to find that its still pretty wet

On my way back to the hotel ...

behold, 2 IFC or if you like 國 際 金 融 中 心 二 期

Proof of what capitalism & free markets can achieve. & in daylight it looks like this

Later on this afternoon, its time to go up-country

Resolution of the bar quandary

In light of my earlier concerns about what might have happened to the Captains Bar …

I am pleased to say that I gave the re-styled facilities an extensive road test last night & the décor must have been OK as I dont remember going to bed & awoke this morning to find clothes scattered all over the floor of my hotel room. So it must have been a good night then!

As views from hotel rooms go ...

this certainly isn’t a bad one

Its a shame about the pollution haze. Can’t have everything though. Time to go to the bar methinks

& so the shooting season finishes, not with a bang but a long haul flight

As game shooters will know, this weekend is the last of the season & as regular readers will also know, your humble correspondent hasn’t had much time this year to get the barrels of his Beretta warm. If fact, he didn’t even manage to make his annual pilgrimage to the moors of Scotland & if that wasn’t injury enough, not being to even get to Bisley over the last couple of months has only served to heaped up further insult. Still, all of that is going to be rectified this weekend as we have our annual end of season ‘cocks only’ day on Saturday, followed by Short Siberia japery care of EX_STAB on Sunday … assuming that the Saturday night doesn’t become as errrrrrrrrr liquid has it normally is.

As plans go, it wasn’t a bad one, right up until the moment that the CEO needed someone, experienced in dealing with whiley Oriental chappies to go at short notice to further Sino-British relations & try to undo some of the damage that the arch-nanger Brown has been doing in Peking this week. This sadly will entail missing my shooting weekend but on the flip side, it will mean abusing Cathay Pacific’s drinks trolley service for about 12 hours tonight, as I fly to Hong Kong. Yes it’s a bummer about the shooting, as is also the woeful lack of entries in the Game Book this year … but on the flip side there is the opportunity to visit old haunts in Whanchai & ‘the Fong’ – a tough call I know, but someone has to put their liver on the line for the greater corporate good.

Having left Hong Kong in 1997, returning only once a year later for a short visit, if the truth be known, I will be fascinated to see how the place has changed after what is now, nearly 11 years since Mrs T sold out to the Communists: but like everything in life, there is no such thing as a free lunch (unless you have a generous expense account) & for a few days, I shall be locked in earnest discussions with some of the more tedious lawyers it has ever been my sorry displease to meet – however when you are hung over to billy-oh, the last thing that you actually want is Bobby Broker pitching you the latest credit crunch busting financial product, with all the accompanying bluster that seems to accompany the occupants of certain Investment Bank’s ‘front desk’ personnel – so I will settle for dull lawyers, a pile of legal documentation & another Alka-Seltzer thank you very much.

Whilst the end of the week will see me up-country in some unspeakable Chinese city with a completely unpronounceable name, eating the local delicacy which will inevitably be badgers balls (or someone equally vomit inducing), on the up side, I get to drink in possibly my favourite bar (note bar, not pub) ever … The Captain’s Bar in the Mandarin Oriental Hotel.

I hear rumours that it has had a bit of a freshen up but by all that is good & holy, if they have ruined it, I’m on the next flight home! So I shall direct my following comments to the old bar, as I remember it in when old Mr Lee was last building me gins in ’98 & the condensation formed on pewter tankards full of ice cold foaming Carlsberg (pronounced Carls-i-berg in HK). In fact, said esteemed hostelry almost defies description … a head on car collision between orient & 70’s chic. & boy o boy, did it ever work. Forget those faceless hotel lobby bars which could be anywhere in the world; sit in the Captains Bar & know just know that you are in Hong Kong; just don’t be surprised if an immaculate Roger Moore should walk into the place & ask for his drink not to be stirred. It’s that sort of place.

If it has been ruined by ‘refurbishment’ then expect my howls to be heard around the globe on early Wednesday evening when I fully intend to be sitting down at the end of the bar, kicking off with a couple of post flight bracers. In that case I would have to retire to the floor above , home to the wood panelled Chinnery Bar which was originally opened in 1963 but didn’t open to women until 1990. Aside from its gentleman’s club feel, it is noted for serving serving traditional colonial cuisine & whiskey. Need I say any more?

Saturday shooting

In the five minutes that it wasn't raining, Boy & your humble corrspondent whiled away time shooting tin cans

Nanny keeps saying that young people need to spend more time outdoors, but the same Nanny would keck itself if it knew just how much ammo Nipper goes through. Nothing like giving a young lad an air rifle, a tin of pellets & watch him enjoy himself.

Easy like Sunday morning

This morning you find your humble correspondent sitting at the kitchen table undertaking that onerous of tasks … filling in his tax return. Taxes are of course one of the most odious things that the state foists upon us bulldogs & to add to the indignity of it all, we are required to fill in a form that reminds us just how much we are forced to pay for such good governance. Its enough to make you want to hit the bottle hard – but even by my shabby standards, 10:15 on a Sunday morning is just a tad early to be breaking out Scotland’s finest. Now one or two of you might have noticed that I have two other forms also sitting on the table that need to be completed. The first for a variation to my FAC, the other is an application for an Explosives Certificate … oh yes!

That form is slightly different to the normal FAC/Shotgun Certificate forms. On page 8, you have to specify the generic class of explosives that you are applying for & as menus go, everything looks absolutely delicious.

For example, do you want Explosives, Blasting, Type D or what about Charges, shaped, commercial without detonator? Better still would be some Cord, detonating, flexible as there is always fun to be had playing with detcord just as there is with Charges, shaped, flexible, linear. In fact, I think I will just apply for the lot as sadly I can’t see a box entitled Enough damn explosives to overthrow the State & Bring send the entire edifice of Government sky high. Maybe the Glorious Day just took one small step closer?

Water water everywhere

The road to FM Towers this morning ...

& the view from the bridge.

Back to the belly of the beast

For the last 2 years, your humble correspondent has been working for a small company & for the 4 years preceding that, ran his own business. Those of you that are economically active in those parts of economy will know that it has a lot of advantages including but not limited to such things as flexibility & a more relaxed attitude to dress code. It is of course a professional life that comes with many issues as well.

Anyway, about 3 months ago I was approached by a very old chum who I had worked with in Asia & is now running a very very large company that for the purposes of this & any future posts, we shall refer to as Megacorp, with a view to going to work for them. At first, I feigned polite disinterest right up until it was explained just how much money they where prepared to pay for my (somewhat shabby) services – this believe you me had me downloading their Report & Accounts as well as studying their website in incredible detail. So, to cut a relatively short story even shorter, this morning you find me on a train into London, suited & booted.

I must say that all of this isn’t without more misgivings than I thought that I would have … back to commuting & wearing a tie, office politics & boardroom bust ups etc etc. However the other side of the coin is that in the week running up to Christmas & also the New Year, long forgotten things like IT Departments have been on the phone to ascertain my ‘requirements’. Then there was the office manager wanting to know how I wanted my office configured, followed by calls form PA’s & the Human Remains Dept wanting to pick up on all the other many wonderful accoutrements of corporate life … & I suddenly felt the tentacles starting to wrap themselves around me once again as that big boys balance sheet started to draw me in - & do you know what? I don’t care

This afternoon has been mainly spent donkey walloping

Boxing Day exercise

As others so correctly predicted … I bet Mrs. Free Market was involved in this little shindig ... Mrs FM & her horsy chums where off chasing foxes again, notwithstanding the Westminster Village’s ‘ban’

I do try to be consistent of this particular point but I have little time for the Foxhunters & regard the entire palaver as a very inefficient form of vermin control

However if this is how they want to spend their time, that is entirely their own business & certainly nothing to do with London’s ever nosey busy bodies

In fact, as is usual at these affairs & especially true on the Boxing Day Meet, the horses might well be champing at the bit, but there is always stirrup cup etiquette of be observed

Bollocks to Blair / Brown & a lot of others, come to that

This evening at FM Towers

as the moon rose, the mist was just starting to roll up the Vale & over the village

A minute after I took this, the moon had disappeared behind a cloud, the light had gone & the mist had settled in for the night. Time to go light the fire have a cup of tea & watch One Man & His Dog

The Daily Mail exposes Family FMs Christmas dinner plans

Apparently

For decades, a few simple slices of turkey were all it needed. But now even the traditional Christmas dinner has been supersized. Multi-bird roasts, where different types of bird are stuffed inside a larger one, have become the thing to carve this year - and the more birds involved the better.

One of the top-sellers is the Waitrose four-bird roast: guinea fowl, duck and turkey breast stuffed inside a goose. Demand has soared 50 per cent this year - even though each roast costs an eyewatering £200.

200 quid a lot of money – that’s about what a brace of driven grouse costs you to shoot.

The surge in popularity may have something to do with TV chef Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall's creation of a ten-bird roast on his show two years ago. He stuffed an 18lb turkey with a goose, duck, mallard, guinea fowl, chicken, pheasant, partridge, pigeon and woodcock - producing a remarkable Russian doll-like dish.

Fearnley-Whittingstall is a pretty sensible individual – he kills things & eats them; nothing wrong with that. However the Daily Mail goes on to report this on little morsel…

1. Turkey, 2. Goose, 3. Barbary duck, 4. Guinea fowl, 5. Mallard, 6. Poussin, 7. Quail, 8. Partridge, 9. Pigeon squab, 10. Pheasant, 11. Chicken, 12. Aylesbury duck

Now I can’t help thinking that stopping at quail is a missed opportunity – there is surely room in there for a snipe? Best of all however is a comment left on the article by one James Mills of Nottingham

These graceful animals were alive and living a short while ago. Go veggie this Christmas and let more of gods creatures experience what you do ...Life

Mr Mills is clearly missing the point on these birds … unlike your humble correspondent who tends to kill a lot of game over the course of the season

A cold turkey leg to Gareth for this one

Today isn't going well...

due mainly to the biblical size of this mornings hangover

I might be back later, but then again, I might not. Pass the aspirin please

Peace & quiet

Currently you find your humble correspondent in formal-bid-to–go-in-by-Friday hell, having pretty much worked through Sunday night. In about an hours time, the my mailbox will to fill with the latest pricing information. Continuing this mornings somewhat wintry theme, a week or so ago, Bambi Basher sent me this picture

At the moment, I can’t think of a place that I would rather be, just as long as it doesn’t have a WLAN, GPRS or GSM coverage

Frost, tyres & the .303 cartridge

It’s not just that as I staggered out of FM Towers yesterday morning, despite being still three quarters asleep, that it was well Pearl Harbour

& certainly Disco Dave was thought it was cold enough.

I was certainly grateful for one of the most obvious manifestations on the Triumph of Western Civilization ... heated seats. Anyway, it was off into town to get some new tyres. While Dave was up on the jacks, I noticed this poster on the wall

& there was me thinking that when it comes to stopping the Hun, the Mk7 .303 cartridge is the best (cough cough) solution to the problem

AWOL

Whilst this was the sight that greeted your humble correspondent at in Heathrow’s Terminal 2 at ungodlyoclock this morning …

The real stuff that you get to drink in Milan by mid morning is a lot lot better

Its been a long day

Of flags & the General's daughter

There seems to have been quite a lot of mention of nautical flags over the last few days – Maggies Farm have been considering them in the context of social signals & Remittance Man posted Nelson’s immortal message prior to the Rugby World Cup Final.

Now I freely profess that my own knowledge of this topic is somewhat tenuous. I do know that certain flags can mean a letter if flown one way, or a message if flown another. So for example, the ‘Bravo’ flag can mean the letter B or if flown upside down or back to front or something like that, mean ‘I am taking gin on board’. Have I got that right? Maybe not, but it certainly is a plausable message knowing as I do nautical tastes.

Another example is the ‘Zulu’ flag, pictured below

It can signify that letter Z but which can also mean ‘I need a tug’ ... & stop that sniggering at the back!

This dual meaning can of course lead to a certain degree of confusion Many years ago now, Mrs FM & a chum of hers, the General’s daughter, had to sit a sailing exam for qualify them for something along the lines of a summers aft deck binge drinking. In fact it ended up as quite a long summer because having passed the exam, Mrs FM sailed away & didn’t come back for three years.

As I said at the top of this post, I know nothing about matters nautical save for the proper way to build a pink gin & exactly how much gin needs to go into it (the greater of lots / all that you have). Mrs FM is the opposite: she sets foot ashore reluctantly – it isn’t just that she can actually sail a boat very very well, she can build them to boot. Sail repairs, rigging, motors … all no problem which is why the aforementioned exam posed very little problem to her.

The same can't be said for the General’s daughter – who shall we just say had had a slightly more land locked upbringing as the General in question wasn’t just any old 3 star General, at that time he was CEO of the Army. Thus when his daughter was asked to state what the Zulu flag’s alternate message was, loudly announced to the assembled yotties

“I need a hug”

which whilst being a very good answer, isn't quite the correct one. Needless to say, that particular response is still costing her drinks to this very day & Mrs FM continues on a regular basis, to give thanks for VHF radios.

First Frost

0715, -1 degree, Jack Frost has called in the night. Still, with the onset of a couple of frosts, the sloes will now be ready of picking.

Since I took that picture, puppy has been out barking at the contractor’s tractor that arrived shortly afterwards & is currently parked in the yard. Mrs FM has a theory that the fact that its a Massey Ferguson, is causing puppy to bark.

Apparently in tests, 8 out of 10 Labradors preferred John Deeres. Personally I think Mrs FM is talking a right load of Jackson Pollocks but there is no way that I’m brave enough to tell her

Now while we are on matters rural & more specifically on how they might pertain to these yerrrrr parrrrrrrrrrrts, I simply had to steal this

from The Englishman. The funny thing is that it isn't funny at all. Things are pretty much like that down'ere

& so the autumnal rains start

The view back across the Vale this afternoon as I took the dogs out to stretch all of our legs

The hell of Microsoft

More by luck rather than design your humble correspondents recent IT issues have finally resolved themselves. The hardware was the easy part – a simple trip to the IBM dealer on the Tottenham Court Road & a very brief conversation along the lines of

Is it a company machine?

Oh, it’s definately a write off

There’s a surprise! Well, not a surprise some £1,500 later - but at least I have the latest bigger (smaller in fact) better, faster more errrrrrrr functional (eh?) Thinkpad. Wonderful, so now I have 80GB of hard drive to fill with my largely incoherent ramblings ... things might be looking up, but maybe not for you the reader!

However, reloading the software was shall we say, slightly more tortuous, mainly because that brought me into contact with Microsoft & the inevitable pain that that particular course of action brings with it. Now don’t get me wrong, I have nothing against private sector monopolies that have been created not by government mandates but by giving the customer if not what they want ... or roughly something that they think they might want. However if you use Google Images to find Microsoft Technical Support, this is what it throws up …

& nothing no nothing could be further from the truth.

That picture would seem to indicate that if you try to register some Microsoft OEM software there will be someone at the other end of the line, OK so in a different time zone, who has at least a tenuous grasp of the Queen’s English. But no, it wasn't so much that it wasn’t my evening, it just hasn't been my life recently, in more ways than one.

So to whoever it was that I spoke to & I never did quite catch your name, yes I have installed that copy of Microsoft Office on to a laptop that currently smells like a Starbucks outlet which is maybe just maybe, why I am installing the same copy on to a new machine. Do I bl**dy well sound like a Chinese software pirate that has phoned simply to taunt?? You utter utter nanger!

Mr Microsoft Help Desk fellow, thanks a lot for the ear bashing - next time I need some software, I’m going to do like every sensible person does & use a hooky copy.

Curry Heaven

Returning back to FM Towers this evening, my latest delivery has arrived from The Curry Sauce Company (whose products we heartily endorse)

Time to pop some bog roll in the fridge

Autumn is but round the corner

Yesterday morning, post walk, the Labradors of Libertarianism stretched out on the lawn in the autumnal sunshine to do what Labradors do best for a few hours.

We have had no appreciable rain at FM Towers since 18 August & the early autumn as the leaves start to turn, has been utterly glorious. Over the last two weekends, I have picked twelve pounds of damsons, ten pounds of blackberries & the bushes in the garden are covered in sloes, just waiting for the first frost before those end up in gin filled demijohns. In fact a quick check on the intharweb-thing-a-me reveals that others have been busy on similar tasks.

Pheasant season starts in a couple of weeks time so next weekends jobs include clearing out the freezers of old game that still lurks – so pie & an equal measure of game pate it is next Saturday

Black Death

Not far from where your humble correspondent was schooled (or to be truthful, dedicate teachers tried in vain to hammer some sort of education into my thick skull & about 30 miles from FM Towers is this most quintessential of English churches. However, not only does it perhaps epitomise many peoples vision of what a parish church should look like, situated at the bottom of a small hill, nestling close to the woods, it also represents over 700 years of history of one small village - mainly because it is known locally as the 'plague church'.

The church itself was already maybe several hundred years old when the Black Death - Yersinia pestis (bubonic plague) came to England in the summer of 1348. That year the harvest failed due to abnormally heavy rains & crops lay rotting in the fields, due to the nearly constant rains - I think in those days it was just a bad summer & not conclusive proof of global warming. With the harvest so adversely affected it seemed certain that there would be food shortages, but a far worse was to come.

Village legend has it that a tinker who travelled through the woods (to the rear of the church) that still contain a roman bridge to this day, carried the plague. What is clear is that inhabitants of the village were all but wiped out & the settlement abandoned. This clump of weeds is in fact the buried ridgeline of the houses. This was much more pronounced 20 years ago, but recent ploughing has made the line much less prominent. Those few who escaped, established a new village that survives to this day approximately half a mile away, further up the hill.

In the corner of the churchyard, is the village yew tree. Whilst the presence of yews at places of worship dates back to a pagan age, perhaps its most well known use was as the material of choice for longbows. 5' or more in length, with a flat back & round on the belly, for hundreds of years, the weapon of choice of stout bulldogs wh