The Buccaneer

 

It is now 51 years since I made my last Buccaneer flight when I disembarked from HMS Eagle on a 2-hour flight to Lossiemouth piloted by Lt Robin Cox of 800 Squadron. I had accumulated a little under 1500 flying hours, 294 catapult shots, and 295 arrests during my time in the Royal Navy, and was leaving as one of the few observers to pass the Air Warfare Instructor's Course, the British equivalent of what is now known in the United States as the Top Gun course, according to US General Chuck Horner who was the commander of US Central Command Forces in Desert Storm, the equivalent of a doctorate degree in Fighter Operations.

Only over the past few weeks have I been able to obtain a number of buccaneer pictures, hitherto unpublished, and so I am taking this opportunity of publishing them here in my blog. Those of you who are "in the know" will see that they are a mixture of squadrons, Navy squadrons 800, 801, 736, South African Air Force 24 Squadron, and RAF squadrons 12,15,16, 208, and 237. I have not attempted to discriminate between the various pictures.  

 

The Buccaneer was originally designed to be a low-level attack aircraft with the capability of approaching a then-Soviet warship beneath its radar dome in order to deliver its weapon load, be it conventional or nuclear, without being detected. Hence many of the sorties carried out were essentially low level. Examples of these may be seen in some of these pictures.

Very few people think that the buccaneer was capable of formation aerobatics - think again. Dave Howard ran a successful team as may be seen in the following picture

There was also a formation flypast for the launching of QE2 - not aerobatic though !!

 

The Bionic Man

 It has been over a year since my previous post, a year in which plenty has happened, least of all a close call with the big D. I had thought that all was normal before that close call. The first signs were my losing my balance in the house and being unable to get to my feet by myself. To cut a long story short, I was whisked to casualty at the local hospital and after receiving six units of blood and was ferried to Dartmouth Hitchcock Hospital by helicopter and released two weeks later. Apparently, I was the victim of a bleeding duodenal ulcer. It was only a few weeks later that I was informed by one of the casualty surgeons that they had "almost lost me".

The year has been useful to me in other ways in that I have been able to take advantage of a generous discount being offered to me by the same hospital. I am sporting a replacement knee in my left leg, have had cataracts removed and new lenses in both eyes, and had corrective surgery for a bilateral hernia. Today I received the first of two Lumbar Medial Block procedures, following which, if all goes well, will be a longer procedure for a Lumbar Radiofrequency Ablation. 

I make no secret of the fact that I am delighted that we no longer have A/H Trump as president. He is still trying to say that he won the last election despite being turned down by the courts countless times. This next paragraph is dedicated to those numerous white evangelists and supremacists who still believe in the Antichrist. In John le Carré's latest novel he writes Trump is Antichrist, Putin another. For Trump, the draft-dodging rich kid brought up in a great if flawed democracy, there is no redemption in this world or the next. ...... He's Putin's shithouse cleaner. He does everything for little Vladi that little Vladi can't do for himself; pisses on European unity, pisses on human rights, pisses on NATO, Assures us that Crimea and Ukraine belong to the Holy Russian Empire, the Middle East belongs to the Jews and the Saudis ......

Of course, it is up to you, my reader,  as to whether you agree with Mr le Carré. I will remain the uncommitted reporter.

Birds of the Northeast Kingdom - specifically Sunset Drive, St J.

As I am now well into my ninth week of self-isolation, and still healthy, I thought it appropriate to once more put pen to paper, metaphorically speaking. The city library has been closed to the public for the duration, so being a quick and avid reader I have at last picked up ( and am halfway through) the 1026-page The Bear and the Dragon by Tom Clancy. Yesterday my oil paints saw the light of day for the first time in many years (nearly twenty by my calculation).

At least the weather has finally settled down to a warm Spring, with daytime temperatures in the 60s and 70s, so Liz and I have been spending some time in the garden. The ride-on mower has been taken out of winterization and put to use, and we have a load of herbs, vegetables and flowers planted. Jake very kindly came over the other day and built us a couple of planter boxes, which we have already put to good use.

 

I thought that I would use this post to talk about some of the birds that we have witnessed here in Sunset Drive. Only two species of note have been with us right through the Winter months, the Bluejay and the Cardinal.

 

The first birds to return from their migration are always American Robins, followed a few weeks later by the Goldfinch, the Crested Titmouse, and the Chickadee

 

 

The last two weeks have seen Liz and I scampering to identify species we have not witnessed before. The Purple Finch is a regular visitor to our birdfeeders

Other visitors to the yard have been the Rose-throated Grossbeak

  

and the Summer Tanager, and we have seen an Indigo-bunting a couple of times.

Last evening Liz identified a visitor as an Oriole

I have only included pictures of the more colorful visitors. There are others like the woodpeckers, starlings, crows, doves, turkey, and so on. 

Of course, birds are not the only visitors to our yard, as the following pictures will attest. We have had numerous white-tailed deer - a bunch of nine together one night

as well as a groundhog, a skunk, a fox and grey squirrels. 

Four weeks in self-quarantine

Today marks the end of the fourth week where I have been under self-quarantine. Here in Vermont, like much of the rest of the country, we have to keep at least 6 feet from other people when we have to go out, and we have to wear a mask. I have been stuck in the house for 4 weeks with a couple of exceptions. I went shopping in Littleton a couple of times with Liz, although I stayed in the car and she did the shopping. Other than that I have been twice to a bank to pay a bill (most all banks here in the USA have a drive-through, and this means that you get to stay in the car.

At long last, the snow has gone away, hopefully until November. On a couple of the warmer days, I have been in the yard planting bulbs, corms, and seeds. g We also invested in a small greenhouse in which I have been planting my pole-beans in peat growing pots. In a few week's time, I will be able to transplant them outside. I am an avid reader, but have been unable to visit the local library for 4 weeks,

Trump continues to make a fool of himself, treating his daily Coronavirus briefings as a campaign rally. We are at the peak of the outbreak and he wants to open up the economy in three week's time, which he can't do because he has no control over what takes place in individual states. Only the governors of each state can re-open businesses such as banks, restaurants, gymnasiums and retail outlets. At the latest count, some 16 million people were out of work in the USA. He can't get it into his stupid head that if he opens up the economy too soon there will be another surge in the infection and ultimately the death rate. I personally hold him directly responsible for a large proportion of the 22,859 deaths that have occurred from this virus in the USA at the time of writing.

Self Quarantine

The present COVID 19 scare has shown just how incompetent our so-called president is. Today the DOW fell more than 2,500 points in the first 2 minutes of the opening bell and within a few points of 3,000 by the close of the day. For my part, I have decided to self-quarantine at home for the foreseeable future. This is because of my age together with my condition (COPD). This also means that for the present I will not be carrying out any substitution at the Academy, which may be closing down for a period anyway. All indications are that the country is falling into recession.

All of this is bad news for our egotistic president, who is completely fixated on self-image and on how well the stock market is doing. Only since Sunday night's Democratic presidential debate in which both Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders showed themselves to be far more presidential than Trump, has he changed his tune somewhat regarding the Coronavirus pandemic.

I just spent 20 minutes chatting on videophone with my sister in the United Kingdom. She, like me, has self quarantined at home and is pretty depressed about it. Here in Vermont and neighboring states, all schools are closing at the end of classes today, restaurants, theaters, gyms, bars and many businesses except for grocery stores and pharmacies are banned from opening to the public. For my part, I have canceled a planned visit to my ophthalmologist down in Lebanon in early April.

I can't wait for Spring. My sister turned her camera outside to show me her magnolia tree in full bloom and her spring flowers. I have a bunch of bulbs to put in as soon as the ground unfreezes; daffodils, narcissi, croci, gladioli, and freesias. I uncovered my rose bushes a couple of days ago when most of the snow had melted, but guess what! We have a white carpet on the ground once again,