in the telegraph-----

Enjoy Belgium. On the Fort class ships we carried everything. Fuel for warships and aircraft, stores, ammunition of various types etc. Obviously the ship was designed to be able to contain fire / explosion (I hope) so its a little different than carrying that stuff on deck on a tanker. The only good thing with working with the RFA apart from it was fairly interesting at the start and we had a civil service pension was you'd get double bubble pay if you where in a war zone!! as a 3/0 I was on 18000 quid back then so double bubble for a trip of 4-5 months made a bit of a difference back then. But not enough to make me stay it should be said!!! lol. Not nearly enough for a civilian to be paid with the possibility of getting shot at / bombed / chemical attck / nuked.

I believe there are some buckets of sunshine stored at the base in Oxford as well. My mate is MOD plod and was stationed there for a while. As a slight aside I work with a lot of "yes" vote blokes at work and one of their arguments is about this and trident. It does make me smile a little though because it is a little short sighted in my view when you think about the local economy, jobs etc that the MOD actually bring to the area. I know its probably not the best thing to be lving close by but I'd prefer it to a quarry, pit, industrial works, power station etc. Be interesting to see what happens to the likes of Helensburgh.

That will actually pass pretty close to our house in the uk. We live on one side of the M42 and it will be on the other side. It is due to go through a local MP's back garden in quite an expensive village very close to us so we'll see what happens there. I honestly don't think it'll bother us to much and that its another 8 yrs or so away I think so a lot can happen between now and then. I don't agree with the project though to be fair. Its massively over budget for something that will shave off 20min travel time off the journey from north england to London. Obviously there should've been continuous investment in the present, extensive network we already have to keep it comparable to the standard of other countries around the world.

As long as its not given to the halfwits who tried to do the Edinburgh tram system, now that is a transportation white elephant!!

It is not just the UK, the USA is the same.

Years ago in CNCo we had a little boxboat called the POLYNESIA, which had the hellish run of San Francisco, Tahiti, Pago Pago and back. We drydocked her in Todd Shipyards rather than pull her off the run. and we got a bill of three times the estimate. rather than go to Court we said lets see if we can sort this out and on her next call Ron Sullivan, an excellent Oz super, and I went round the ship with the Todd people. 18 different trades had been used on a simple first special docking of a little boxboat.

At the end of the day the bill was down to 1.3 times the estimate and we shook hands and went off to dinner. Over dinner I asked "What happened?" "Oh, said the now-friendly Todd guy, all the guys we had on this job had only ever done Navy work before!