Dark Alex's Really Long Post Thread.

[indianasmith]

I guess I am in the minority; I have always loved THE STAND.

[chefzombie]

i am too then, indy, it still is my fave king book. the tv series SUCKED, imho.
  alex, my little butthead, i've got a pair of brassies that are both bigger than your cute bald head, i don't NEED to be a real man, lol! besides, nobody carries the groceries or opens the doors for real men anyway...
  and yes you CAN let us read it, take picture of the pages,please! * ftr, i'll type it out for all of us, since rumor has it his handwriting is a little...doctorish... *

[Alex]

So you are telling me you don't know how to Nerf some Webels then?

[chefzombie]

nope. and i don't want to learn if it will turn me into a man. 

[Alex]

Hearing a lot of stuff about the Epstein guy and prince Andrew and that he should go over to the US to face questioning. You know what? I agree with that completely. I also believe that if Andrew (or as he was known while I was growing up Randy Andy), is guilty of crimes he should do prison time. No house arrest bollocks, regular prison that other sex offenders go to. Mind you, I also believe that the wife of the American diplomat who drove on the wrong side of the road, then ran over and killed someone then fled the country (she doesn't get diplomatic immunity), should be sent back and made equally to face the music. trump has already said he will not send her back though.

I wonder if both our governments could come to some sort of agreement here though.

Had a b***h of a day at work. My immediate boss had rushed a job yesterday in a hurry to get away for a long weekend. He isn't back in until halfway through next week. I got in this morning, found out a balls-up had been made of the whole thing and I then spend my entire day sorting a mistake that under normal conditions would have taken me half an hour tops. Now bearing in mind that I started work at 08:00, had a lunch break from 12:00 to 13:00 and had no other breaks, it still took me until 14:47 to fix that mistake and then another two hours to deal with the issues arising from his error and other random phone calls.

By the time I was heading home, my brain felt like it was melting and ready to come running out my ears. When I go into work on Monday I'll have all the work I should have been able to do on Friday to do.

So I am going to chill out a bit tonight, work on Werfing my Nebels (almost got it finished) and maybe even paint my new (if still second hand), 3rd edition Blood Bowl Dark Elf team. Blood Bowl is a fantasy version of (American) Football, where you can have wizards turn up, chainsaws and all manner of hilarious deaths. Traditionally you take an existing American football team's name and give it a fantasy team, which is great except very few people in the UK (or indeed Europe), know the names of any American football teams. One of the sample teams as an example is called the Orcland Raiders. My own team I christened 'Meame Deathfists' as I think there is a team called the Miami Dolphins.

Although for all I know they could be a baseball, basketball, or even nude skydiving team*.

I suppose I could ask Kristi but she isn't a fan of American sports either, with the exception of Ice Hockey and I think that might be Canadian.

Oh, and she also likes that car driving one. You know the one where they keep turning the same way around a track for hours on end. Random observation that just occurred to me. How come she likes that but hates roundabouts? Basically it is the same thing.




*I suspect nude skydiving isn't actually a sport. However given how much attention I pay to these things it might be.

[Alex]

60% of the way to Kraken. That's only taken me what four and a bit years?

Saw an article yesterday I thought I'd share. If you've ever wondered about the benefits of a bit of socialism, or why business has to be regulated and not just left alone to make money then give it a read.

"Hunger, filth, fear and death": remembering life before the NHS
Harry Leslie Smith, a 91-year-old RAF veteran born into an impoverished mining family, recalls a Britain without a welfare state.
By Harry Leslie Smith

Over 90 years ago, I was born in Barnsley, Yorkshire, to a working-class family. Poverty was as natural to us as great wealth and power were to the aristocracy of that age. Like his father and grandfather before him, my dad, Albert, eked out a meagre existence as a miner, working hundreds of feet below the surface, smashing the rock face with a pickaxe, searching for coal.

Hard work and poor wages didn't turn my dad into a radical. They did, however, make him an idealist, because he believed that a fair wage, education, trade unions and universal suffrage were the means to a prosperous democracy. He endured brutal working conditions but they never hardened his spirit against his family or his comrades in the pits. Instead, the harsh grind of work made his soul as gentle as a beast of burden that toiled in desolate fields for the profit of others.

My mother, Lillian, however, was made of sterner stuff. She understood that brass, not love, made the world go round. So when a midwife with a love of gin and carbolic soap delivered me safely on a cold winter's night in February 1923 into my mum's exhausted arms, I was swaddled in her rough-and-ready love, which toughened my skin with a harsh affection. I was the first son but I had two elder sisters who had already skinned their knees and elbows in the mad fight to stay alive in the days before the social safety network. Later on, our family would include two half-brothers, after my mother was compelled to look for a more secure provider than my dad during the Great Depression.

By the time I was weaned from my mother's breast, I had begun to learn the cruel lessons that the world inflicted on its poor. At the age of seven, my eldest sister, Marion, contracted tuberculosis, which was a common and deadly disease for those who lived hand to mouth in early-20th-century Britain. Her illness was directly spawned from our poverty, which forced us to live in a series of fetid slums.

Despite being a full-time worker, my dad was always one pay packet away from destitution. Several times, my family did midnight flits and moved from one decre­pit single-bedroom tenement to the next. Yet we never seemed to move far from the town's tip, a giant wasteland stacked with rotting rubbish, which became a playground for preschool children.

At the beginning of my life, affordable health care was out of reach for much of the population. A doctor's visit could cost the equivalent of half a week's wages, so most people relied on good fortune rather than medical advice to see them safely through an illness. But luck and guile went only so far and many lives were snatched away before they had a chance to start. The wages of the ordinary worker were at a mere subsistence level and therefore medicine or simple rest was out of the question for many people.

Unfortunately for my sister, luck was also in short supply in our household. Because my parents could neither afford to see a consultant nor send my sister to a sanatorium, Marion's TB spread and infected her spine, leaving her an invalid.

****

The 1926 General Strike, which began just as my sister started her slow and painful journey from life to death, was about more than wages to my dad and many others. It was called by the TUC in protest against mine owners who were using strong-arm tactics to force their workers to accept longer work hours for less take-home pay. At its start, it involved 1.7 million industrialised workers.

In essence, the strike was about the right of all people, regardless of their economic station, to live a dignified and meaningful life. My father joined it with enthusiasm, because he believed that all workers, from tram drivers to those who dug ore, deserved a living wage. But for my father the strike  was also about the belief that he might be able to right the wrongs done to him and his family; if only he had more money in his pay packet, he might have been able to afford decent health care for all of us.

Unfortunately, the General Strike was crushed by the government, which first bullied TUC members to return to their work stations. Eight months later, it did the same to the miners whose communities had been beggared by being on the pickets for so long. My dad and his workmates had to accept wage cuts.

I remember my sister's pain and anguish during her final weeks of life in October 1926. I'd play beside her in our parlour, which was as squalid as an animal pen, while she lay on a wicker landau, tied down by ropes to prevent her from falling to the ground while unattended. When Marion's care became too much for my mother to endure, she was sent to our neighbourhood workhouse, which had been imprisoning the indigent since the days of Charles Dickens.

The workhouse where Marion died was a large, brick building less than a mile from our living quarters. Since it had been designed as a prison for the poor, it had few windows and had a high wall surrounding it. When my sister left our house and was transported there on a cart pulled by an old horse, my mum and dad told my other sister and me to wave goodbye, because Marion was going to a better place than here.

The workhouse was not used only as a prison for those who had been ruined by poverty; it also had a primitive infirmary attached to it, where the poor could receive limited medical attention. Perhaps the only compassion the place allowed my parents was permission to visit their daughter to calm her fears of death.

My sister died behind the thick, limestone walls at the age of ten, and perhaps the only compassion the place allowed my parents was permission to visit their daughter to calm her fears of death. As we didn't have the money to give her a proper burial, Marion was thrown into a communal grave for those too poor to matter. Since then, the pauper's pit has been replaced by a dual carriageway.

****

Some historians have called the decade of my birth "the Roaring Twenties" but for most it was a long death rattle. Wages were low, rents were high and there was little or no job protection as a result of a postwar recession that had gutted Britain's industrial heartland. When the Great Depression struck Britain in the 1930s, it turned our cities and towns into a charnel house for the working class, because they had no economic reserves left to withstand prolonged joblessness and the ruling class believed that benefits led to fecklessness.

Even now, when I look back to those gaslight days of my boyhood and youth, all I can recollect is hunger, filth, fear and death. My mother called those terrible years for our family, our friends and our nation a time when "hard rain ate cold Yorkshire stone for its tea".

I will never forget seeing as a teenager the faces of former soldiers who had been broken physically and mentally during the Great War and were living rough in the back alleys of Bradford. Their faces were haunted not by the brutality of the war but by the savagery of the peace. Nor will I forget as long as I shall live the screams that fell out of dosshouse windows from the dying and mentally ill, who were denied medicine and solace because they didn't have the money to pay for medical services.

Like today, those tragedies were perpetuated by a coalition government preaching that the only cure for our economic troubles was a harsh austerity, which promised to right Britain's finances through the sacrifice of its lowest-paid workers. When my dad got injured, the dole he received was ten shillings a week. My family, like millions of others, were reduced to beggary. In the 1930s, the government believed that private charities were more suitable for providing alms for those who had been ruined in the Great Depression.

Austerity in the 1930s was like a pogrom against Britain's working class. It blighted so many lives through preventable ailments caused by malnutrition, as well as thwarting ordinary people's aspirations for a decent life by denying them housing, full- time employment or a proper education.

As Britain's and my family's economic situation worsened in the 1930s, we upped sticks from Barnsley to Bradford in the hope that my father might find work. But there were too many adults out of work and jobs were scarce, so he never found full-time employment again. We lived in dosshouses. They were cheap, sad places filled with people broken financially and emotionally. Since we had no food, my mum had me indentured to a seedy off-licence located near our rooming house. At the age of seven, I became a barrow boy and delivered bottles of beer to the down-and-outs who populated our neighbourhood.

My family were nomads. We flitted from one dosshouse to the next, trying to keep ahead of the rent collector. We moved around the slums of Bradford and when we had outstayed our welcome there, we moved on to Sowerby Bridge, before ending up in Halifax. As I grew up, my schooling suffered; I had to work to keep my sister, my mum and half-brothers fed. At the age of ten, I was helping to deliver coal and by my teens, I started work as a grocer's assistant. At 17, I had been promoted to store manager. However, at the age of 18, the Second World War intervened in whatever else I had planned for the rest of my life. I volunteered to join the RAF.

****

My politics was forged in the slums of Yorkshire but it was in the summer of 1945, at the age of 22, that I finally felt able to exorcise the misery of my early days. In that long ago July, I was a member of the RAF stationed in Hamburg; a city left ruined and derelict by war. I had been a member of the air force since 1941 but my war had been good, because I had walked away from it without needing so much as a plaster for a shaving nick. At its end, my unit had been seconded to be part of the occupational forces charged with rebuilding a German society gutted by Hitler and our bombs.

It was in the palm of that ravaged city that I voted in Britain's first general election since the war began. As I stood to cast my ballot in the heat of that summer, I joked with my mates, smoked Player's cigarettes and stopped to look out towards a shattered German skyline. I realised then that this election was momentous because it meant that a common person, like me, had a chance of changing his future.

So it seemed only natural and right that I voted for a political party that saw health care, housing and education as basic human rights for all of its citizens and not just the well-to-do. When I marked my X on the ballot paper, I voted for all those who had died, like my sister, in the workhouse; for men like my father who had been broken beyond repair by the Great Depression; and for women like my mum who had been tortured by grief over a child lost through unjust poverty. And I voted for myself and my right to a fair and decent life.

I voted for Labour and the creation of the welfare state and the NHS, free for all its users. And now, nearly 70 years later, I fear for the future of my grandchildren's generation, because Britain's social welfare state is being dismantled brick by brick.

****

My life didn't really begin until the end of the Second World War. I fell in love with Friede, a German woman, whom I married and brought home to Halifax. My wife gave me emotional stability while the welfare state gave me economic stability. When I was demobbed, I didn't have many prospects, except using my brawn over my brain. I took factory jobs while my wife and I studied at night school. But I am forever grateful for the foundation of the NHS, because it allowed my wife to receive first-rate treatment for the PTSD she acquired by having witnessed both the atrocities of the Nazis and the firebombing of Hamburg, which killed 50,000 people in three nights of intense RAF bombing in 1943.

My experiences of growing up in Britain before the NHS, when one's health was determined by one's wealth, and after 1948, when free health care was seen as a cornerstone for a healthy economy and democracy, convinced me that it was my duty to share my family experiences at this year's Labour party conference. I agreed to speak about the NHS because I know there are few people left who can remember that brutal time before the welfare state, when life for many was short and cruel. I felt that I owed it to my sister Marion, whose life was cut short by extreme poverty and poor health care, along with all of those other victims of a society that protected the rich and condemned the poor to miserable lives. In many ways, making that speech freed me from the suffering of my youth.

Harry Leslie Smith is the author of a memoir: "Harry's Last Stand: How the World My Generation Built is Falling Down and What We Can Do to Save it" (Icon Books, £8.99)

Harry Leslie Smith is a survivor of the Great Depression, a Second World War RAF veteran and an activist for the poor and for the preservation of social democracy. He has authored numerous books about Britain during the Great Depression, the Second World War, and post-war austerity. Join Harry on Twitter @Harryslaststand.

The half an eye I occasionally keep on how the election is going says that boris is heading for a win. I think a lot of people are going to find after the election that they are sheep and they've voted for the wolves, but what do I know about it?

Took Ash to meet Santa for the first time. He wasn't sure about the guy with the beard and red suit and didn't want to go near him, but there wasn't any screaming so I guess that counts as a win. I am looking forward to seeing how he handles Yule next year when I think by that age he'll at least have a bit of an idea of what is happening.

[Alex]

So today they decided to carry out a simulated aircraft crash exercise. I volunteered to go out and guard the non-existent crash site. Mostly because it gets me out the office. Anyway, I turned up at the assembly point and was asked if I had brought 5 days worth of kit with me.

"No" I replied. I don't tend to wander into work lugging five days clothing and supplies on the off chance an aircraft is going to plow into the ground (this was about 15 minutes after the call for guards had went out. It takes me 20 minutes to walk home, I could back in 30 mins and then another 20 minutes to get back to the assembly point. So, anyway they issued us with our live preserving gear, emergency kit and so on, then gave us a sit-rep and got us to load all our kit onto a bus to ferry us out to the crash site. This consisted of driving once around the building we had been in (and it isn't a big building), then all getting off the bus, unloading our gear and then heading back to work.

Oh well, it was a couple of hours distraction.

Ash was throwing a full-on tantrum tonight when I got home. I picked him up, put him in his cot and then closed his bedroom door and let him scream until it was no longer his enraged screaming, but more a general crying. Got him up, let him play in my shower for ten minutes (which always cheers him up) and then got him straight off to bed. Kristi looked like she'd had a day of it, so I've sent her out for a couple of hours so she can chill out and relax, watching the new Malicifent movie.

[chefzombie]

i see why she keeps you, butthead. you're a good man. 
  so do you get to see the nonexistent crashed plane too?

[Alex]

No, it was a stealth aircraft and invisible to the human eye.

[chefzombie]

   now why didn't i think of that? 

[Alex]

 now why didn't i think of that?  

Because you are a woman and use fuzzy thinking instead of logic?  

I can say things like that in the sure and cetain knowledge that you are too far away to hit me.  

I was once in an argument with an ex-marine who is now working for the police. I was calling him all sorts of funny names and he pointed out that he knew lots of ways to kill me and that all of them hurt. In my retort, I pointed out that I was 800 miles away and quite safe. That was about 15 years ago and he still hasn't managed to get up here to take his vengeance.

Thinking more about having to move work places. The ideal solution would be to stay where I am and do that job for my last around 1300 days, but that isn't an option. If I want to stay at Lossiemouth the only realistic way that is going to happen is via a squadren. That means I am then spending more than half the year away from home. Also against that is that it takes 18 months of actually working on an aircraft before you know it well and are experienced. By the time I go off and do five months training, then get hands on experience... I am pretty much walking out the door with a promotion to Mr.

Option two is working at a recruiting office. I can volunteer for that, but there is no guarantee I'll get picked for it.

Option three, is going down to Coningsby. I can get a post down there similar to the one I have here. But that means moving down to England and with the racism me and my fellow Scot's have experienced down there previously it is somewhere I am very hesitant to take Kristi, especially with the whole Brexit crap still going on. After the vote was held things got quite ugly in a lot of places south of the border and Kristi got an advisory from the US embassy not to travel to England after some Americans were attacked there and told to go back home. She ended up cancelling a trip she'd planned to meet some of my cousins down there. Might be that were we are going is a bit more cosmopolitan and we might not have those problems, but it isn't something I really want to take a chance on. A lot of English people will tell you that when they say something about Scotland its just banter, but that we really hate the English. Total bollocks. Start telling them some of your experiences and they quickly try to change the subject.

Much to consider, ponder and just generally wonder about.

[Alex]

Option number one today. Do a weeks guard duty next year when I had some leave booked to go to some concerts.

Option number two today. Do a months guard duty next year at a different camp when I am wanting to go to some other concerts.

Le sigh. Oh, and I'd have missed Ash's birthday doing the month's guard.

[chefzombie]

i wish i could give you good advice, love, i truly do...but in this case i can't. but i know that in the end you'll do what's best, because it's who you are. even if you are a butthead! :)

[Alex]

So the Tories have won the election as I expected, but to much larger margin that I thought they would. They have lost over half their seats in Scotland leaving the SNP as the only real party representing Scotland in Westminster.

[Alex]

Five more years of Boris Johnson...

I mean really. Mind you, the way things have been going there may be an election long before that lol, although his government has enough of a majority to actually hold onto power and the only thing that I can see toppling them at the moment would be a bad brexit.

Slipped on the stairs earlier and had a bit of a fall. Bit of a jolt to my right arm and hip, but nothing serious there. Might not be jumping over fences today though, just take it easy and not aggrivate any minor injuries

Got away from work to go to two of my bosses leaving drinks. I'd wanted to go for a single beer and come home, but people kept buying me drinks so I had six pints before I managed to get away. Besides after finding out that I am going to be doing a month on guard afterall I needed some alcohol. Generally feeling happy and relaxed today. Made some toasted cheese for breakfast, which Ash shared with me.  I didn't get any choice on that one, he came over and spun my computer chair around to move me out the way so he could get it.

He is so my child lol.

I've got guard training to do Monday and Wednesday so I won't be in the office too much next week. Thinking that is a good thing. I just wanted out of there yesterday and not in my usual 'I can't be arsed with work' type way, it was a burning desire to be somewhere, anywhere else.

Ah, for the life of the idle rich and not having to work. A life dedicated to enjoyment.

Mind you, I'd only slip into decadence. Not that I think Kristi would put up with me doing that for long.

Kristi got me Phil Campbell's solo album (and a signed copy at that). Kudo's to you if you know who he is. And if you don't, well then you've missed out.

Managed to have sex a whole five times this week. The whole baby / toddler has been putting a real cramp on things there to the point I've been wondering how the hell parents manage to have more than one child when the existing one seems to do so much to prevent the chances of having any siblings.

I randomly remembered a minor incident from my childhood today. My older brother was being all bossy as was his nature and I was being rebellious as was my nature. He ordered me to carry a bag that had some of his and some of mine in it. If he'd asked me to carry it then everything would have been fine, but I objected to him trying to order me around in front of other people, so I said fine I will carry the bag, but you didn't say anything about the contents and promptly emptied his stuff out onto the street. As he got older he never changed his approach to people that way, and indeed still hasn't. It worked while he was in the forces, but now he is out, well I doubt he'll ever learn now.

Got the rest of our holiday decorations up. I couldn't find our tree topper so as a temporary one, I stuck a Yoda figure on top. Later on I am going to go put my skull collection on the tree because I was told I couldn't.

Like I said, it seems to be my nature to rebel.