The Night Mail

[SM42]

19 minutes ago, Tony_S said:

Last time I went I got pneumonia! 

 

Had they run out of cuckoo clocks and chocolate?

 

Andy

[SM42]

The weather has taken a dull turn and a stiff breeze has blown up  

 

Rain is forecast  

 

Mrs SM42 wants to go cycling. 

 

I fear dampness in my future. 

 

Meanwhile pictures are up and I've started packing for the return to Blighty.

 

My employer, rather inconsiderately, insists I attend next week. 

 

How rude. 

 

Andy

 

 

[jamie92208]

19 minutes ago, SM42 said:

 

Had they run out of cuckoo clocks and chocolate?

 

Andy

Last time I went, my first trip I was instructed by the boss that on no account was I to bri g her chocolate and definitely not a f**king cuckoo clock.  The only gifts available in the shop were cow bells. I've not been forgiven yet. 

 

Jamie

[New Haven Neil]

5 minutes ago, jamie92208 said:

Last time I went, my first trip I was instructed by the boss that on no account was I to bri g her chocolate and definitely not a f**king cuckoo clock.  The only gifts available in the shop were cow bells. I've not been forgiven yet. 

 

Jamie

 

I think all we came back with was a leany-over glass from the Glacier Express.  Oh, and a huge credit card bill.....but not as bad as that from Paris the month before!  (Silver wedding and my 50th celebrations - ie some time ago!).

[Happy Hippo]

5 minutes ago, jamie92208 said:

Last time I went, my first trip I was instructed by the boss that on no account was I to bri g her chocolate and definitely not a f**king cuckoo clock.  The only gifts available in the shop were cow bells. I've not been forgiven yet. 

 

Jamie

I went to Blists Hill for a tramp around this morning.

 

They have an August steam special this coming weekend, so some of the steam powered equipment was getting warmed up in anticipation.

 

I suffered a Spoonerism whilst climbing the hill from the lower to upper sites.

 

Colman's Mustard will never be the same again🤣. 

[Happy Hippo]

12 minutes ago, jamie92208 said:

Last time I went, my first trip I was instructed by the boss that on no account was I to bri g her chocolate and definitely not a f**king cuckoo clock.

I've never seen one of those, only the version where a cuckoo pops out from behind a door and goes 'Cuckoo!'

[Hroth]

13 minutes ago, Happy Hippo said:

I've never seen one of those, only the version where a cuckoo pops out from behind a door and goes 'Cuckoo!'

 

Perhaps Noch do one, they're quite fond of effing figures...

 

[Erichill16]

42 minutes ago, jamie92208 said:

Last time I went, my first trip I was instructed by the boss that on no account was I to bri g her chocolate and definitely not a f**king cuckoo clock.  The only gifts available in the shop were cow bells. I've not been forgiven yet. 

 

Jamie

If Flavio’s party is up to expectations I’d hope to go home leg less!

[iL Dottore]

3 hours ago, Erichill16 said:

When the house warming party?

Better sooner rather than later with respect to your planned renovation work. 😉.

Fyi, I’ll be in Switzerland during September. 

Just two questions:

 

When?
Where?

In September I am meeting up with our Anglo-French representative of le flic (AKA, the plod). 

 

If timings and locations work, perhaps we can all team up and create an international incident?

 

Edited August 9 by iL Dottore
Wording

[iL Dottore]

2 hours ago, Happy Hippo said:

Congratulations on the new house, but you are aware that buying  a holiday lodge in Botswana, does put you in easy striking distance of my Uncle Jasper and Auntie Babs, nephews Ronnie and Reggie, nieces Jezebel and Lucretia and the rest of the Okavango Delta mob.

 

They put the cake snaffling exploits of PB and myself to shame.

Thanks.

 

Don’t worry about my African cake stocks. I have already made arrangements with the SAAF to airlift Uncle Jasper and Auntie Babs, nephews Ronnie and Reggie, nieces Jezebel and Lucretia and the rest of the Okavango Delta mob to within waddling distance of Bear Towers. Plus they’ll each get a map showing the quickest way to Bear Towers plus about £5000 spending money, each.

[iL Dottore]

1 hour ago, SM42 said:

 

Had they run out of cuckoo clocks and chocolate?

 

Andy

1. Cuckoo Clocks aren’t Swiss they are German, from just across the border in the Schwarzwald (Black Forest).
2. We never run out of chocolate…. We have strategic reserves of chocolate..

 

[polybear]

10 minutes ago, iL Dottore said:

Thanks.

 

Don’t worry about my African cake stocks. I have already made arrangements with the SAAF to airlift Uncle Jasper and Auntie Babs, nephews Ronnie and Reggie, nieces Jezebel and Lucretia and the rest of the Okavango Delta mob to within waddling distance of Bear Towers. Plus they’ll each get a map showing the quickest way to Bear Towers plus about £5000 spending money, each.

 

No worries...Bear knows a Hippo that knows some Hippo's.....

[iL Dottore]

1 hour ago, jamie92208 said:

Last time I went, my first trip I was instructed by the boss that on no account was I to bri g her chocolate and definitely not a f**king cuckoo clock.  The only gifts available in the shop were cow bells. I've not been forgiven yet. 

 

Jamie

As you will be (ahem) “escorted for your protection” during your upcoming Swiss tour, you will be shown to some very exclusive emporia where you may acquire a suitable non-timepiece, non-chocolate memento for The Boss.

 

Prices will be reasonable and will not require you to remortgage The Shed.
 

The boss will be happy!

[bbishop]

6 hours ago, iL Dottore said:

As far as I am concerned, the only green vegetables worth eating are spinach, broccoli and peas. All three are endlessly versatile, all three contain “things that are good for you” and all three (in the right [culinary] hands) taste amazing.

 

I don’t voluntarily eat salad, I only consume it out of obligation and for the maintenance of marital harmony; the exception is for a fresh spinach salad with a hot, a bacon and balsamic vinegar dressing (a salade tiède).

 

The only time I will ever voluntarily eat lettuce, is in the French dish of Petits pois à la française:  a classic French way to prepare peas, braising them with some bacon, onion and lettuce.

My breakfast was a lettuce and tomato sandwich.

[bbishop]

At church this afternoon to commission our new audio visual system.  The console is completely scary and I have no idea how it works.  But I know how to look after the microphones during the service.

[SM42]

I'm damp

 

Andy

[Happy Hippo]

49 minutes ago, polybear said:

 

No worries...Bear knows a Hippo that knows some Hippo's.....

This is not a good idea.

 

The Botswana mob is around 4000 strong.

 

The SAAF only have 8 x C130  each of which are capable of lifting 10 hippos per sortie.

 

Since the fleet is elderly, it would be fair to reckon on a 50% availability, so that means that to lift the entire mob from Botswana to the UK (We'll ignore the additional transportation from the delta to a decent airstrip), would be 40 Hippos per trip (4 x 10) .  Turn around on the airframes would be at best 48 hours between sorties, so allowing a 24/7 lift rotation would require 100 trips, or 400 individual airframe sorties.  That's about 200 days (allow a 30 day month)  which is about 6.5 months.

 

Then there is the £5k allowance per hippo which works out at £20M.

 

Knowing Jasper and co, they'd probably turn up at the Bear Trap, sing mighty war songs and offer their services as a mercenary cake snaffling group for a share of the profits.

 

[J. S. Bach]

I have a carrier ready to help with in-flight cover:

 

[jamie92208]

4 hours ago, iL Dottore said:

1. Cuckoo Clocks aren’t Swiss they are German, from just across the border in the Schwarzwald (Black Forest).
2. We never run out of chocolate…. We have strategic reserves of chocolate..

 

But have you run out of cow bells, just asking for someone not far away. 

 

Jamie

[AndyID]

5 hours ago, iL Dottore said:

 

Prices will be reasonable and will not require you to remortgage The Shed.
 

 

Only the house 😁

 

Many yonks ago (when Switzerland was still actually affordable) we had just driven from Switzerland into France in Dad's Cresta PA, complete with wrap-around front an rear windows, on to a French road that had just been chipped. The speed limit was something like 15 Km/h but that didn't stop some jerk in a Citroen Traction Avant doing about 50 coming in the other direction. Of course the windshield took a hit and as this was before laminated windshields the whole lot caved in PDQ.

 

We were heading home and as there was little to no chance of getting a new windshield in France we headed for Boulogne as fast as possible. When the customs officer at Dover saluted us as we were leaving customs Dad could not resist sticking his arm through what should have been the windshield and waving back 😀

[J. S. Bach]

Night Owl from the Piedmont.

[AndyID]

2 hours ago, jamie92208 said:

But have you run out of cow bells, just asking for someone not far away. 

 

Jamie

 

I doubt they've run out of bankers.

[jjb1970]

Switzerland is switching from banking to shipping, it's a great maritime powerhouse (I am only half joking, the world's biggest container shipping line is Swiss).

[iL Dottore]

9 hours ago, Happy Hippo said:

The SAAF only have 8 x C130  each of which are capable of lifting 10 hippos per sortie.

 

Since the fleet is elderly, it would be fair to reckon on a 50% availability, so that means that to lift the entire mob from Botswana to the UK (We'll ignore the additional transportation from the delta to a decent airstrip), would be 40 Hippos per trip (4 x 10) .  Turn around on the airframes would be at best 48 hours between sorties, so allowing a 24/7 lift rotation would require 100 trips, or 400 individual airframe sorties.  That's about 200 days (allow a 30 day month)  which is about 6.5 months

 

Some Ukrainian friends are lending some Antonov AN-124 Airlifters they want parked in a safe space. That’ll speed things up a bit (they can also go by sea - the MSC Irina is available - if they want the “cruise ‘n’ cake” option. [Southampton will never be the same]).

9 hours ago, Happy Hippo said:

Then there is the £5k allowance per hippo which works out at £20M.

Pocket change, my dear fellow, pocket change.

9 hours ago, Happy Hippo said:

Knowing Jasper and co, they'd probably turn up at the Bear Trap, sing mighty war songs and offer their services as a mercenary cake snaffling group for a share of the profits.

That’ll be “interesting”, given that The Bear is notorious for being incredibly reluctant to either share cake or dig deep into his pockets (some unkind people would call him “tight-pawed” which is a vile calumny: he’s just channeling his inner Yorkshire-Scottish bear*)

 

* there’s probably no truth to the rumour that PB regards his Scottish and Yorkshire ancestors as extravagantly spendthrift…. 🤣

[iL Dottore]

4 hours ago, AndyID said:

 

Only the house 😁

 

Many yonks ago (when Switzerland was still actually affordable)…

I think that is one of the great myths about Switzerland: that it is terribly expensive. It isn’t really, and nowadays London is a hell of a lot more expensive than, say, Basel or Bern (and that’s just as a visitor).
 

Of course, there is a lot of serious money about, but most of it is “old money“ which means that you don’t see it. Serious money in Switzerland is very, very discreet, none of this loadsamoney nonsense you see in many other places.

 

One thing few people realise about Switzerland is that up until just after the Second World War it was actually quite a poor, mostly agrarian, country (for a number of centuries over its history the Swiss earned money by providing mercenaries to the various warring European factions).
 

After the war, taking advantage of an undamaged infrastructure and a cohesive and socially disciplined population, Switzerland embarked on expanding its nascent chemical, pharmaceutical, finance and banking (amongst other) industries. It also took advantage of the solidly stable Swiss franc to be able to attract the best and brightest that it needed for its industrial expansion and pay them accordingly*.
 

When I came to Switzerland at the end of the 80s, there were still plenty of UK expats around who had come to Switzerland in the 60s and 70s. No matter how varied their background or what their particular area of expertise was, they all invariably said that by moving from the UK to Switzerland they were able to double if not treble (and sometimes even more) what they were earning in the UK. 
 

I think that that still holds true today. I was reading in an English newspaper (I think it was the Guardian) that GPs could earn as much as £110,000 a year (Gasp! Shock! Horror!); if a British GP spoke German, Italian or French (and they pass the local certification exams) they could definitely earn in Switzerland at least double what they might earn in the UK working as a GP (and they’d have a better work/life balance as well). This is true for a huge range of other professions as well.
 

I think very few people living in the UK realise how much of a low-wage high-tax country Britain is; a country also burdened by obscenely elevated housing prices in those areas where jobs actually exist.

 

Switzerland isn’t perfect, far from it, but it is certainly one of the very best places to live in Europe at present.

 

* foreigners often wonder at how efficiently Switzerland works, especially public transport. I think it is because the Swiss are willing to pay qualified people appropriately [and treat them properly] being cognisant of the old expression “pay peanuts, get monkeys”