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Archives for June, 2017
Toybarnhaus Redhill Raffle Winner
Toybarnhaus in Redhill celebrated its first birthday in its current shop on 17 June with a raffle for its customers. The prize was a shop display box of Lego's Nexo Knights. Alexander spent some minutes staring at it before we went into the shop. Me and the kids collecting our raffle prize from Toybarnhaus Redhill (photo: Tracy Kemp) As I often do on a Saturday morning, I went in with Alexander to look at the Lego. We were enticed by the special birthday offers to buy some Lego with Alexander's saved pocket money. Lucy also got some, and we got a raffle ticket. I put it in my wallet and thought no more of it. It was quite a surprise to find out that we'd won the raffle! We picked up the display box yesterday. It's a huge box…
Since I Bore Arms by Robert Holding [book review]
Since I Bore Arms by Robert Holding My rating: 5 of 5 stars Since I Bore Arms is an anonymised personal account of the France 1940 campaign by an infantry private soldier. The author was a private in an infantry battalion sent to France in late April 1940. The account is unusual in that very few ordinary soldiers wrote about their experiences. Since I Bore Arms The narrative is a day by day account from getting orders to embark for France until his return to the depot in the UK after being evacuated from the beach at Dunkirk. Holding doesn't name his battalion, and he has changed the names of all those mentioned. As an ordinary soldier he didn't know much of the big picture, and usually didn't know where his unit was. What he does cover is how far…
Eric Olafson: Midshipman by Vanessa Ravencroft [Book Review]
Eric Olafson: Midshipman by Vanessa Ravencroft My rating: 3 of 5 stars This is the ninth book in the Eric Olafson series, which I hadn't realised when I agreed to read and review it. I'd been fooled by the Midshipman part of the title and had mistakenly thought it was the first of a series rather than the ninth! Eric Olafson: Midshipman Overall I enjoyed the book, and there were some excellent aspects, it had me wanting to keep reading it once I'd got about half-way through to see how it finished. As you'd expect there's a deep background to the universe that Eric Olafson: Midshipman is set in. Very little of this is explained, but it made sense. There are references to things that I presume happened in previous books, but the story is self-contained and stood well…
Castles in the Cloud [Poetry]
I referred to the Castles in the Cloud poetry in my post about cyber warfare the other week, and only after I'd published it I realised that the poetry wasn't generally available, unless you'd bought my book Themself. So here are those poems, if you like them you might also like the book. Castles in the Cloud Laying Siege Unsuspecting users are unaware of spam silently suborning their systems. Malware lurks waiting for the one in a million. Click conscripted computers, zombies in the 'bot-net horde, pillaging user credentials and sending more spam. Each zombie sends tens of millions of emails before they too are cleansed. One day the hordes will swell, the tide sweeping away all defences. Then the zombie apocalypse will infect us all. Castles in the Sky Fortresses nestle in their own cloud, keeping out trojans. Patterned…
Pte William McColgan MM – Died of Wounds 9th June 1917
Portrait of W. McColgan. Image kindly provided by Marlborough memorial project (2009). Image has no known copyright restrictions. Private William McColgan MM was my great, great-uncle. His older sister Mary married John Kemp in 1900, William would have been ten years old then. Before the War William McColgan was born in 1890 in Old Kilpatrick. His mother was Catherine Mulholland and his father Patrick McColgan. On the 1891 census he had three older siblings, and more were to follow. Sometime before WW1 started he emigrated from Scotland to New Zealand. He worked for a Mr Lucas on Opawa Farm near Blenheim at the north end of the South Island. I couldn't find this on the map, the current Opawa Farm is several hundred miles to the South near Christchurch. I assume that he worked on a farm near the Opawa…