Truro Model Builder

Hopefully my work colleagues and I can get the stocktake completed by Friday evening. Otherwise SWMBO and I will be reporting for duty bright and early.

Have to agree on the Chipmunk; my first ever flight was in WP833 from Exeter Airport on 20 December 1984. So many ex-Air Cadets who are now somewhat older -if not entirely wiser- will have similar memories, and many a purchase is informed by nostalgia. By the way, any ex-cadets remember this?

The time to have brought out a new tool Vulcan was while XH558 was still flying. The longer we get from its grounding the less likely it is, in my opinion.

An ideas meeting at Airfix: "I know. Next time the photographers are in we'll leave a photo of a Blackburn Beverly on the wall with '1:72?' scrawled on it."

Skyraider.

Yesterday lunchtime there was a KC-135 undertaking a race track pattern over the top at 15000ft. My house is under Air to Air Refuelling Area (AARA) 10 West so I do occasionally see the odd tanker and chicks. Nothing joined up with it while I was watching, which was particularly disappointing as the B-2 deployment is still on.

SWMBO and I have just returned from a week in sunny Cambridgeshire. There was the expected pilgrimage to Duxford and an hour at RAF Lakenheath watching F-15s, though nowt at Mildenhall bar the tumbleweeds. I also unexpectedly came across a nice model shop in the upstairs of a cycle shop in Ely, with the result that my wallet came away a little lighter. There were many familiar names were seen on road signs... Wyton, Alconbury, Waterbeach, Oakington, Warboys, Mepal. All of them now quiet, in some cases the runways long gone, in others used for storing cars or just left to slowly break up. It makes you realise just how busy the skies were around those parts not too many years ago. But even with what is left it was very noticeable how bereft of military aircraft the skies were. In the whole week and discounting the visit to Lakenheath and Mildenhall I saw one MC-130 and one MV-22 when I was near Ely, one Austrian Hercules that had just taken off from Cambridge Airport flying over the city and heard barely enough (probably) F-15s in the overhead to count on one hand. I did see a Dragon Rapide in the evening sun over Grafham water and watched a D-Day striped Dakota drone over Huntingdon Sainsburys, unexpected sighting that were nice, but the lack of military aircraft was startling.

The morale of the story being to make sure you maintain good lookout in the turn.

As I now spend my days driving a delivery van around the highways of Cornwall I have amassed another set of grumps, but of them all the one that annoys me most is drivers who cannot be bothered to acknowledge when you stop and wait for them to come through a narrowing or around a parked car. I have to say that younger female drivers are the worst for this, but it is rude and discourteous whatever age or gender.

There is an element of the emperor's new clothes in replacing perfectly adequate kit parts with aftermarket etch and/or resin. Often there is a good reason, but sometimes you compare the replacement with the original and wonder if the aftermarket company is just after it for the fun of screwing money out of the gullible. I long go gave up on using etch in 1/72 aircraft, with the exception of seat harnesses, and even with my drift to 1/48 I still sometimes question whether the only reason I am buying PE is because that's what real modellers do.

I texted my boss and told him I was on the train heading for the south coast. "What are you on about?" he asked, "You know full well to be here at 7am." "You tell me," I replied, mystified. "You're the one who told me to be in Brighton early this morning."

RAF Hawk T.1s were never fitted with the plumbing required for auxiliary tanks. Export versions were, but the RAF never requested it in the original specification. It certainly would have made the Red Arrows' overseas trips easier.

Why does the battery in your smoke alarm only ever let you know it needs replacing at three in the morning?

My wife wanted to try "pet names" to liven things up in the bedroom, but it didn't go well. She didn't like being called Rover.

I bought a new set of knives today. The packaging carried a warning about eating fried chicken.