Area 136

Just read Juzzzys post and thought I would share this picture with you.

As some of you will know, my dad was in the Royal Navy during WW2. He volunteered - but he could not swim. Now I think I know where I get my habit of putting myself in potentially bad situations. Anyway, they put him on a boat. Not a big one, but the Germans did try to sink it a lot anyway.

Especially on D-day.

I was nothing personal, it was just that they objected to the allies trying to get on the beaches before them. Well you know what Germans are like about sun bathing.

So anyway, below is an LCL of the type my dad spent the war on stubbornly not getting sunk. This is also the type of boat that he and his shipmates almost stripped bare on the voyage back to the US navy dockyard when the war was over. It was only borrowed you see. (see the post "my father the thief")

And no, it's not the one in the front with wheels on - it is the one behind it.

He did once tell me a little bit about D-day. About some of the stuff that happened when they were landing the troops. I am glad it was only a little bit. Horrible.

It is amazing some of the things our grand parents or parents had to do, ordinary people having to do terrifying things. Some of them gave their lives.

Luckily for me my dad didn't.

She seems to have got impossibly tall in the two weeks away. Of course she has not - a little perhaps - but she just looked a lot taller. And her skin seems to be more like mine than her mums, she does not have much of a tan but you can see she will go brown easily like me and not go red like Jo.

She has also picked up another bucket of cocktail umbrellas and novelty stirrers like she always does, and proceeded to make me a "cocktail" of apple juice with a peach half impaled on the glass rim into which she sticks the various flags and umbrellas and sparkely things the way she saw them do it in the rock bar her and Jo spent most evenings in.

She gave me a massive hug.

She told me tails of water parks and the friends she made and the things she saw. Showed me the picture of her on a donkey that carried her along cobbled streets in the old part of town.

I am so glad she is back.

What is the best answer you have ever given anyone in reply to a stupid question?

My two personal favourites are:

I was talking to someone on Holiday who came from Birmingham.

“Oh my mum came from Birmingham” said I

“Really! Which part”

“All of her”

Well it’s an old one but a good one.

My next favourite was when talking to a distant relation at one of those big family barbies that you get dragged to once you marry into a family that likes that sort of thing.

“Where do you work?” they asked me.

“Central London”

“I wouldn’t like to commute into there every day, where do you travel to?”

“Liverpool Street Station”

“And what do you do?”

“I get off, that is where the train stops”

Yeah, I’m a smartass I know. And I’m bored.

Sooooooo

Tell me your snappy comebacks to dumb questions.

Edit - I have just realised that the above where not really stupid questions, they were inane and dull conversations that I wanted to end. So maybe I should re title the post. Ah sod it.

Meh.

Tonight I get to see Sarah after her two-week holiday in Rhodes!

God I missed her.

I am going to have a takeaway back at the house with her and Jo before Sarah goes over to her Grannies to be looked after while Jo is at work tomorrow.

Then on Friday night she will come and stay at S&F’s with me and we are taking her to Thorpe Park on Saturday. I will have to go on all the scary rides with her.

Oh dear.

What a pity.

Hehehehehe.

In other news I am still busy as a thing with lots of things to do here, so now that the city is doing the dance of a thousand sandwiches I will trawl about the net and have a catch up.