The Monday Book

Jack has the honor of the Monday book post (and just scraped through in time).

Portrait of a Legend – Spitfire, Leo McKinstry, 2007

I am a complete nut for airplanes (or aeroplanes as we Scots would say), so stumbling across this book in a thrift store in Oban in Scotland a couple of weeks ago was like discovering the holy grail (we also visited Roslyn Chapel on our trip).

I should say that as a Quaker I have very mixed feelings about warplanes, but the Spitfire seems to transcend that and can stand in its own right as a thing of beauty. Many of the pilot testimonies in the book talk of that beauty of the plane as distinct from the job it was designed to do.

Most books about the Spitfire paint a romantic picture of a machine that appeared just in time to ward off the Nazi menace and the winning of the ‘Battle of Britain’ in 1940. What I hadn’t realized until reading this one was what a struggle there had been from its maiden flight in 1936 to getting it into production. The company that designed it was a very small business specializing in seaplanes and had won a series of high speed races in the early 1930s with planes designed by R. J. Mitchell who went on to design the Spitfire. But the business was far too small to undertake the contract to build the numbers that were needed in the approach to WW2. Attempts to outsource production went disastrously wrong and the construction of a massive new factory went equally badly. Even after its acceptance by the public as the ‘icon’ of fighter command it continued to be mired in high level debate surrounding its suitability for a whole range of different and essential tasks.

spitfire

Despite all that it remained in service around the world from 1939 through the late 1950s in a wide variety of roles and still thrills crowds at air displays to this day.

I well remember seeing a Lancaster, a Hurricane and  Spitfire flying over our house near Leuchars RAF base in Scotland about 15 years ago at low altitude – six Rolls Royce Merlin engines making a wonderful sound!

I can thoroughly recommend this book to anyone with a passing interest in the story of this gorgeous flying machine – a big thumbs up!

 

Je Suis un Mancunion

Jack’s weekly guest post –

I’m writing this the day after the terrible terrorist bombing at the end of the concert in Manchester and there are many thoughts swirling through my head. Of course the first thoughts are for the families of the kids who died – and many of them were young teenagers without any sense that they could be in danger at all. There were even two young friends from Barra in the Outer Hebrides off the west coast of Scotland. It’s an island with less than 1000 inhabitants. One is in hospital with serious injuries and the other is still missing and unaccounted for as I write this.

But while my first thoughts were for the families, there was something else bothering me.

I’m reminded of how the Falklands war broke out so conveniently for Margaret Thatcher just as an election was approaching–one she might easily have lost. Of course, with much flag waving and ‘British spirit’ she was re-elected comfortably. I’m reminded of a movie Wendy made me watch called WAG THE DOG, about an American president creating a fake war to boost his popularity. I didn’t want to watch it because it seemed so unsavory to write a comedy about something Britain had probably done. It was a funny movie, but in it the war was faked entirely rather than actually carried out under false pretenses.

And here we have a bombing just before an election when Theresa May’s polling results show her popularity plummeting. I’m not suggesting that this was a ‘false flag’ event (the name under which the British secret service carried out events they blamed on other groups during the ‘troubles’ in Northern Ireland). Sometimes false flags involve true terror organizations being guided by shadowy figures who operate at arm’s length.

Perhaps it’s not a false flag, rather that a terrorist group consider having someone like Theresa May as British Prime Minister will give them a much better opportunity to create more havoc, so they decided to give her help.

I’m not much given to conspiracy theories, but the timing of this is just highly suspicious to me. Mrs May’s catch phrase for the last month or so has been ‘strong and stable’ – repeated to the exclusion of any real policies. Then just two weeks before the election she is presented with the perfect scenario to be  ‘strong and stable’ and immediately raises the danger level to its highest  in over ten years. This also allows her to put troops and armed police on the streets.

Of course no-one on the opposing political side can possibly do anything else except support her under these circumstances, meanwhile all electioneering has been put on hold.

How terribly convenient!

Update –

Since writing the above post, I’ve checked a few of my favorite sources (favorite because of their lack of histrionics and hyperbole) and it seems I’m not alone in my suspicions. At the very least Mrs May seems to be milking this for all it’s worth and neither the police or the army are happy with her approach which they describe as counterproductive even if they had the numbers to do it effectively.