Keith 66

Doing a marsh clean up along Canvey sea wall a few years back about 8 of us down on the saltings & wall slope bagging rubbish & heaving the bags up to two guys on the wall we came to a patch of bushes within which can best described as a transvestites nest. Lots of lingerie, stockings & kinky boots. The strangest thing was the boots of all styles, leopard spotted, red, pvc etc, all of them were left footed.. From this we deduced that a one left legged tranny was on the loose on Canvey. Doesnt really surprise me.

My father in law spent some months working in Bangladesh rebuilding a pharmaceutical factory that had been flooded out, he often ate with the local engineers & said the level of heat they were accustomed to was far more than most westerners could cope with. He managed. A club member recently told me a yarn fron the early 80's when he had backpacked across India with a friend on a couple of honda mopeds, he said they ate at roadside foodstalls & some of the food was superb some less so. At one memorable stop they ate fresh parathas that he said were excellent & cups of chai to wash them down. Having drunk their chai down they gave the cups back to the stall proprietor who promptly washed them with a rag in a large puddle across the road. Next to the puddle was a tin shack, they noticed a fair queue of blokes at the shack, as they were preparing to leave a woman came out of the shack & washed her lady bits in the same puddle then went back inside ready for her next customer........

A few years ago we went to Boxstock cigar box guitar festival at the Slade rooms in Wolverhampton, wondering where to eat three doors away was Jivan's Balti house so in we went. Small place with tiny booth style tables crammed in, plastic tablecloths, lots of asian people eating there & you could see into the kitchen. Staff & Waiters in jeans & t shirts. We had a starter, main course & rice & peshwari naan & my son & i had 2 cobra beers each, wife had water as she was driving. £45 quid for the three of us & i can honestly say it was one of the finest indian's we have ever had. The only one that topped it was the Urban Tandoori in Small street in the centre of Bristol, rather more upmarket & expensive & absolutely superb. The worst indian i have had is in local Benfleet indian the Mumtaz (known as the Bumtaz), sloppy muck swimming in oil with ****** all meat & guaranteed indegestion at 2:00am.

My Dad got vascular dementia towards the end of his life & Mum was sharp as a pin until the morphine switched her off (bowel cancer). But my inlaws both had & have dementia & my wife being nearest it fell to us to deal with most of it. Mil is now 94 & in a good care home, she does not know what planet she is on. Terrible to see. Worse is a good friend whose wife has early onset dementia & is now in her mid 70's. We see them every few weeks for dinner either at their place or ours or at the club, anything to keep her in some sort of normality. Trouble is she tries to join in the conversation & its as if her mind has been totally scrambled, now she is getting violent & its only a matter of time before she has to go into care. If so the council will put a charge on their house & when they die it will go to pay for the care. Homes are a lottery, Mil is in a good one & the staff are superb, it is a real home in every sense of the word. Get a bad one & its worse than you can imagine. Dad passed away in the geriatric ward at Lancaster, after a short illness, there were some terrible dementia cases in there & he called it the legion of the dammed. Best of luck with whatever you do.

Meanwhile i saw a post on fb today of a local "arts" group doing guided mudwalks down our local creek. To even suggest they might require consent will doubtless get them foaming at the mouth.

Back in 83 i was working in a boatyard down Leigh Old town, one morning me & the chippy were having a burn up in a 45 gallon drum brazier, loads of woodshavings etc. The boss comes out of the shop with a few cardboard boxes & chucks them into the brazier. I was in the workshop doing a bit of welding & there is an almighty bang that shook the whole building. We run outside to see a sea of burning debris right across the road. The barrel was burst wide open flat with the base resembling a large wok. It turned out the boss had inadvertently thrown a full aerosol can of easy start into the fire in his boxes...

An interesting article i picked up that was posted on The Airgun forum, It would seem that Tunsten alloys are likely to be highly carcinogenic. Link here, https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/15929896/, It states further research needed but it does not look good.

Just received our new consent. Our Ne site officer really pulled the stops out for us, we have agreed a no shoot on pochard & limits on pintail not that we see many! Limits on mallard widgeon & teal were not imposed but we felt it politic to set some anyway. Our marsh is so heavily overlooked by the public that we have to regard shooting there as a privelidge & have to seen to be sensible, One overshooting episode would see us history. Well pleased!

Thulsa Doom in Conan, managed to make a fringed mullet look frightening.

I think that sadly you are right, Most have no idea what is going on species decline & NE rules & to be honest dont care. Any club sec or marsh warden who has done the new method of getting consent from NE will realise that wildfowling is in real peril of extinction. I have been ploughing through this recently & it is onerous. What really gets my goat is that the ORNEC (List of operations requiring NE Consent) Runs for 28 specified operations the last 3 of which are (26 Use of vehicles or craft likely to damage or disturb the flora or fauna. (27 Recreational or other acivities likely to damage the flora & fauna, (28 Game & waterfowl management & hunting (wildfowling). So in our area we have to contend with PWC's ripping in & out of the marshes, Paddleboarders by the score, Rowers, Sailors, Dog walkers, Commercial angling boats, one of which does a regular run scattering ashes for funerals & can be seen regularly ploughing up 7 down the creek under its 300hp diesel flat out, Baitdiggers, Oyster pickers, Just over the water in Kent they have Mudlarks using hovercraft to access everywhere on the estuary for mudlarking on a fully commercial basis, this taking place from craft that are the noisiest & most disturbance causing method of transport known to man. Technically all these things require consent, So why the hell do we have to suck it up & nobody else even knows or cares if their activity actually requires consent? It is laughable.

I worked in a college then a school as a technician until 5 years ago. The gang culture thing has been around for ever, Mods, Rockers, Skinheads, Punks, Football firms all had their violent sides. At college we had an increasing number of lads from East london & the suburbs, many were black or asian. I got on well with all of those i worked with & treated them the same as any other young lad. What was noticeable was that as soon as you got more then two of them together they became a gang & as the numbers increased this became more reinforced. Our premises lads used to say If a punch up kicked off anywhere on campus it was more often one off those two ethnic groups starting it. But we were not allowed to say it! Their music glorified it & the local kids picked up on it & joined in, Their online gaming glorifies maiming & killing in glorious technicolour with no real consequences. Is it any wonder they get inured to the violence? My last 5 years at the secondary school were largely good but the increase in gang culture across the board with all ethic groups was readily apparent, Rap & Drill music glorified "shanking" people & i heard ordinary white kids half joking about shanking their classmates on a regular basis. We used to count craft knives & chisels out at the begining of a practical lesson & count them back in again at the end. Nobody left until they were all accounted for & at times i had to physically block the door to stop the little scrotes leaving. One day a kid did get sliced by a craft knife outside school, It turned out to have been nicked from another department so i was in the clear! Add the drugs culture into the mix & i think it is now unstoppable. It is just the way it is. Glad im retired & out of it!

I echo Alans sentiments on the Rspb. I was secretary at Canvey when the Thames Gateway project was introduced by the last Labour government. We had a meeting with the RSPB's new land acquisition officer Paul Fisher, very personable bloke who quite unnerved me after a while. It was after he had left that i realised we had sat with him drinking for over an hour & not once had i seen him blink. Truly like the android gunfighter from westworld! Anyway he made it quite clear & stated that as far as the Rspb were concerned Wildfowling had no place on the Thames estuary & was to be stamped out. No pest control was to take place, nothing, no shooting, period. We were simply an irrelavance to be gotten rid of as soon as possible. And so it largely turned out. You cannot trust them, Ever.

It is not just wildfowling clubs it is across the board from shooting clubs, sports clubs, yacht clubs, bowls you name it. The concept of a club where everyone mucks in & helps is becoming a thing of the past, many people belong to the david loyd leisure generation, they expect to pay, turn up do their thing then throw their towel in the bin & walk away. They have forgotten what a club is. Many clubs have people who have been in post for many years & run out of ideas, then insist the club continues down the same path even though its dying. Yet they wont let anyone else have a go at running it in case they make a better job! I belong to a large yacht club where this is painfully obvious, we are turning it round but it takes just a couple of narcissists & you have problems.

Ah the porno bush. Something the kids of today will never know. Today they have their phones with every imaginable conceiveable porno activity on it for free. They will never know the thrill of finding a tattered stuck together copy of Razzle under a hedge or worse luck Health & efficiency!

There is a video online of a very similar tall masted yacht being knocked flat at anchor by a storm recently, it also flipped a large catamaran upside down, she had been round the world & was a heavy boat yet got flipped like a piece of plywood, it happens. My money is on wrong time wrong place.