PhilJ W

Breaking news, Capt. Tom is in hospital with covid and pneumonia. Get well soon sir.

News just coming in Captain Tom is in hospital with covid and pneumonia. Get well soon Capt. Tom.

By the sounds of it the cleaners deserve to keep any cash that they found.

Afternoon all from Estuary-Land. Had a bit of a problem getting into my e-mails earlier but it seems to be OK now. Even better as some links that seemed to be not working properly now are. Now to check that the sell by date lottery has decided whats for dinner this evening.

Indeed, practically all the none ferrous metals had been removed. In retrospect a lot of the time, money and expertise spent on restoring these locomotive wrecks would have been better spent on building replicas of extinct classes. Some parts from Woodhams were used in such replicas but there should have been more.

Cheap Chinese made screws. I was screwing one in when there was suddenly no resistance and when I withdrew the screwdriver the screw head came with it. It was such an effort to extract the remainder of the screw that the piece of work had to be scrapped.

The only Bedford Vals to be fitted with a TK cab were some engineering prototypes.

What about a piece of thin card cut to the shape of the end and with cut outs for the windows and printed with the interior details?

I noticed the home made 'observation platform' on the petrol engined Commer 'Walk-Thru' van just to the left of the Lodekka.

You should read the threads on the generic coaches from Hornby and Hattons. The moans and groans about they don't resemble this company or that companies stock are common. What is it they don't understand about the word 'generic'?

Morning all from Estuary-Land. Not had a lot of bother from the sore foot for a few days and nights. Same last night but this morning after it was washed and dressed it feels like its on fire. Nurofen has been taken and its now cooling down. I had a colleague who's boss used to claim other peoples work as his own. His boss asked him for a report but then he wrote out a report that was total gibberish but he kept telling his boss that it hadn't been finished until his boss came up a few minutes before the meeting and demanded the report. So he was handed the total gibberish report. It only took about five minutes for his boss to come out of the meeting very red faced demanding what my colleague was up to. Unfortunately for him he was followed out by one of the people who had commissioned the report so my colleague handed the real report (which had his name and signature on it) direct to that person. His boss resigned soon after and my colleague took his place.

Goodnight all.

Cake (and bun) lovers look away now.

I have no intention of finding out.

That would be 'S' scale, 1/64. Check out the Chinese figures on e-bay. They come in bulk packs painted or unpainted in a variety of scales. Also there are plenty of road vehicles in 1/64 scale.

Evening all from Estuary-Land. This popped up on Farcebook:- The mind boggles! cheese and Marmite hot cross buns.

London Road South, Lowestoft.

The location has been identified as London Road South, Lowestoft near Mill Road.

The others will almost certainly be broken up on the island and it is then that any spares will be removed. The difficulty would be in deciding which components will be needed.

Afternoon all from Estuary-Land. The use by date lottery turned up toad-in-the-hole for this evenings dinner, and some veg to go with it. An examination of the fridge contents also turned up an extra mature portion of Stilton cheese. The use by date was 2017! A further examination and into the bin it went. As for things stuck up posteriors the stick of dynamite seems like a bit of overkill as a cure for constipation.

T43 would be one of the first AEC Regals introduced in 1929. Most if not all were withdrawn just before the war. I suspect it should be T743 or it may be TD 43.

Back again, opened up my e-mail this morning. There was one supposedly from Ikea telling me that I'd won a £500 Ikea gift voucher. My suspicions were confirmed when it commenced with 'Hello Dear,', just that and no name. I see the 'EU covid jab' thing is in its death throes, not entirely surprising but it makes this mornings tabloid headlines look a bit ridiculous. Many a true word spoken in jest.

Morning all from Estuary-Land. Great to see Trisonic and Smiffy and 5 C back again. Chrisf as Andy said the jabs are on their way. I am also 72 but I understand that the surgery has now run out of vaccine having started on the over 70's and once they get more it won't be long before I get mine. It all depends on when they get more but as soon as they do I've no doubt the jabs will re-commence. The castor went in first. The guy told the medics it was an accident and he had fallen on an upturned table! Here is the article. A doctor shares tales of all the things people have stuck up their bums in his time at one of London’s largest hospitals. There was a gentleman in a satin smoking jacket, with slicked back hair and a cravat around his neck. He brought to mind Noel Coward, only he was standing like John Wayne. It turned out he had the leg of a bed up his arse.’ I’m talking to ‘Dr. Ben Sergeant’ a former surgeon who spent several decades removing errant items from patients’ bottoms. ‘The story he gave me,’ says Sergeant, ‘was that he and his partner were in the process of moving home, and he decided to take a rest by sitting on the divan, which was upside down. He told me that as he did, “I got quite a surprise as I’d sat down on a leg of the bed!”‘ Sergeant had his suspicions. ‘There was a central flaw to his story,’ he explains, ‘because the wheel was deep inside him, and the bolt which fixes the leg to the bed was sticking out the bottom. ‘I asked him how he’d got the leg away from the bed while it was inside him, and I could see the panic in his face as he realised he’d been caught out. He claimed he’d unscrewed it by turning round and round.’ For Sergeant, who’s worked as a surgeon in both the UK and the US, this was the up-the-bum item that flummoxed him the most. He remembers looking at the X-ray with a colleague who said, ‘let’s have a bet on this. If you can work out what it is, I’ll buy you dinner.’ Sergeant had to admit he had no idea!. He explains: ‘Very often the patient’s too embarrassed to say what’s up there, so we were lucky this guy was willing to tell us – even though the real story turned out to be that he and his partner were using the bed leg as a sex toy.’ The range of objects Sergeant’s removed could stock a nearly-new stall at a school fete. His collection includes a couple of vases, a pair of garden shears, ‘a whole variety of bottles’, and more than one ball. ‘I had to break pieces off one of the balls, to make it smaller, in order to get it out,’ says Sergeant, adding, ‘it took me two hours! I was actually thinking as I did it, “I don’t remember going to a lecture on how to get a f***ing ball out of some chap’s arse!”‘ Sergeant also found, ‘a very bright lightbulb that was dimmed by its passage into the nether regions – miraculously, it wasn’t broken’. Then there was the high pressure air hose – ‘the guy claimed his pals at the garage had been horsing around, but it did a huge amount of damage and actually blew a hole in his bowel!’ No less of an issue to dislodge. For his own part, Sergeant recalls a cucumber that was just shy of perforating a man’s colon. ‘The junior doctor didn’t know what to do, and my first thought was to leave it there and allow it to ferment,’ he explains. ‘But of course that’s not what I did. I gave him a bit of sedative and carefully withdrew it.’ Then there was the boiled egg. Sergeant says: ‘a well dressed older gentleman came in, wearing the sort of raincoat one usually associates with flashers. He claimed he’d been standing at a bus stop when a group of youths accosted him, and inserted a hard-boiled egg up his arse. ( ‘It was the fact that the shell had been removed which made the story so amusing to me, and the likelihood so bizarre.’ Sergeant heard about an aubergine jammed up someone’s backside over dinner with a colleague, who, ‘told us about it just as he was serving up the ratatouille.’ While this might have put more sensitive souls off their dinner, Sergeant says that any time you put a group of surgeons together they’ll inevitably chat about things they’ve found in people’s derrieres, usually over a nice steak dinner and a bottle of wine. One of the more wince-making stories Sergeant recalls is that of a railway spike (‘effectively a very large nail-like thing’) embedded in someone’s bum, and, ‘the classic case of a guy who stuck a stick of dynamite up his arse – literally.’ Another of Sergeant’s own medical experiences involved the extraction of a single stem vase – which he kept in his office for some time afterwards. ‘It surprised me,’ he recalls, ‘because something one normally associates with beauty, was not in a terribly beautiful place. ‘The patient claimed he’d been miming along to Bohemian Rhapsody, using the vase as a microphone, when the doorbell rang and he got such a shock, he swallowed it. ‘I tried to be a compassionate and understanding doctor, but it stretches the bounds of credulity that a glass vase could go through his entire gastrointestinal tract and find itself the wrong way round in his rectum.’ Then there was a chap who turned up at the emergency room with a large bar of soap in his bottom. ‘He said he wanted a pretty young nurse to remove it,’ says Sergeant, ‘so I dealt with it, then told him to leave. About four days later, he was back again – I recognised his name on the chart immediately. As soon as he saw me he jumped up and ran out. It’s an interesting way to try to meet women, but we’re hospitals, not pick-up joints.’ Sergeant was working at a large London hospital when he removed around 100 condoms of heroin from the insides of an unconscious man. He explains: ‘People who smuggle drugs will put the cocaine or heroin into condoms, tie them off and swallow them, or stuff them in the , or the .’ One incident that resonates with him was when a man was brought in from Heathrow airport, where he’d been found unconscious in his seat when the plane landed. ‘An astute doctor immediately put a finger in his bum and pulled out a condom of heroin,’ Sergeant explains. ‘X-rays indicated that there were multiple condoms in his bowel, so we took him to the operating room. ‘Two massive policemen came in with us, and the moment I made the first incision, one of them just crumbled. ‘I took about 30 condoms out of the guy’s stomach, then around 40 out of his small bowel, and more from his colon. I said to the copper, “my God there’s a lot of these – how much is each one worth?” He didn’t respond to that or anything else I said, until finally I asked if he’d mind if we could have a bit of a party!” He said, “focus on the operation doctor, your jokes aren’t appreciated.”‘ Fair enough. Contrary to popular belief (and passages from American Psycho) gerbils as bum-pets seems to be a bit of a myth. Sergeant has never come across one, and nor has anyone he knows.

I always liked the Singer Gazelle version.

Goodnight all.