homepage Forums Air Combat & Civil Aviation Battle of Britain + Battle of Britain II Here's what happened (Continued)

Folks,

Happy 10th HWH Anniversary my friend. I will remember that from now on and, yes, the stylings of some of those cartoons were less like Archie and more like those I've seen in Playboy when I was glancing through the magazine purely for its literary content....

I also remember the Vargas paintings done so well in his particularly tantalizing style. I have always found art, even magazine art broadens the mind, haven't you? And they were some classy broads.

In his 80's and having cast off his three live-in playmates deceptively dubbed "The Girls Next Door" for their TV show, Mr. Hefner is about to venture into matrimony once more. His daughter runs the magazine now. With so much more "literary content" on-line and freely available her job must not be an easy one.

You folks in the UK and Denmark have had your fill of snow I'm sure but it is still a novelty down here. All the Christmas snow is now melted and we have had balmy daytime temps around 65 F. / 18 C. for the last few days. All that is supposed to change next week when the unselfish C51 is expected to send us down some frigid Arctic air from Canada.

As I look out upon a warm, overcast, gray rainy day, it is hard to believe that just a week ago we had our first Christmas snow in 63 years and with 14 inches of new powder piled up around us it was bitterly cold with a 25 MPH wind (anything much under 32 degrees F. is "bitterly cold" to us). If I were a betting man I'd bet this pattern of unaccustomed snow may well continue through the winter this year. We had an extreme summer with 90's F. being the rule rather than the exception so why not expect a colder than average winter. Is this another sign of climate shift and global warming?

Let's ask our retired Beefeater, dogsbody, official HWH resident climatologist, prognosticator extraordinary and amateur weatherman, LeRoy what he thinks. Hmmmm. Sorry folks, I cannot seem to rouse him from what appears to be an exceptionally deep slumber. He is slumped... slouche.... reclining there in his customary chair by the crackling fire. Sigh, the holidays do take quite a toll on our LeRoy.

Veritably leaping into my Spitfire last evening I carelessly took to the skies over London. Skies, I must add, that were teeming with angry enemy planes bearing white and black crosses on their black wings. Even though the Studley Grange nursing facility was holding an open house I had reasonably expected to have Dux, MG and C51 on my wing. Apparently there had been some confusion regarding the duty roster that I had laboriously prepared which had rather a bit too conven... make that somehow gone completely missing.

It was a short trip. I went up to greet the Hun in my customary unfriendly manner and they promptly and uncharitably sent me right back down minus my ride and hanging under yards of silk,nylon, ladies bloomers or whatever they make parachutes out of these days. Not only that but, to heap insult upon injury, I distinctly heard laughter coming from inside a passing He-111. OK, I'm not absolutely sure about where it came from. It may have been coming from the ground. JRT gives an uncharacteristically innocent looking Dux a withering look and then he takes a warm seat also by the fireplace.