Ditching The Doctor

I Hope You Appreciate This!
As you should surely know by now, Conrad is an avid watcher of that wonderful dramamentary series "Doctor Who", and has only just been informed that it is now showing on television - right now this very minute.  I cannot take the time out to watch it or this bit of BOOJUM! wouldn't get begun until 8:30 which means not getting posted until 9:30, and both my fans out there deserve a tighter schedule than that.
     Besides, it'll be on i-player.

A panto moment for Peter

     Er - I should also explain that I've been watching series 5 of Game Of Thrones, in order to get through the whole series and Series 6 before Series 7 starts in June; a dirty job, I confess, but I will persevere.  This meant I'd been sitting and idling for an hour before biting the bullet and committing to the blog.  Don't complain, you get all this wit and wisdom for free.

William, yes.  Hartnell, no.

A Word From Our Sponsors
<     > because we don't have any sponsors, unless the Muses, beer and Crosswords count, along with a sense of anarchy.
     "Oh no, this is going to be about his night out on Thursday, isn't it?" I hear you chorus.
     Yes, although I shall keep it brief and (hopefully) interesting.  Nothing is duller and less involving than reading about other people having a good time when you're not.  You might be having a good time right now - if you were watching Doctor Who, for example - but I don't really care.
     So!  I ambled by carefree way into Little-Ur-On-The-Irwell on Thursday afternoon, there to meet with a squadron of my ex-colleagues.  It was a tricky job to get a photograph since Dee has a mortal horror of having her picture taken.  Art?

Dee-picting Scott, some bloke, Tom, Janice (who is a party on her own), Anna, Mo and Russ.

     There were more than this - lots more! - except I didn't get them in the frame when Dee was absent.  We got well-lubricated and then trooped off to Dough for PIZZA! which as you know is one of the staple food groups, or at least ought to be.

From the outside

     From there it was but a hop, skip and jump across the road, where we continue in Part 2*.

When Bluu Was Black
From our seats in Dough we could see the rest of our party carousing across the road in Bluu, especially Simon, who is so large he makes Conrad look small and undernourished.  We trooped across and Conrad then had to endure the light-deficient interior of Bluu, with music played at just below the volume where it causes paralysis and death by subsonic rupturing of the great organs.  Art?

Adam, Tom, Katie and Anna.

     Not only was it loud, Conrad didn't like a single track the DJ played.  That's him hiding behind Katie.  To get a good idea of the ambience, imagine two elephants rutting in a cave and you're pretty much there.
     Artistic diversion was supplied by a young lady doing an art design on the window.  I did get a shot, so here it is:

Lit up by the flash

     I'm afraid I didn't last, one of the consequences of being 167 years old, and was in bed for 11:30, full of beer and pizza.
     Talking of food, I did horrify Dee whilst retailing about my eating a yoghurt six months past it's sell-by-date.  Dunno what the fuss was about, it had been sealed in the fridge, not sat on a windowledge.

More Of The Tallboy
No! Nothing to do with Simon.  The 5 ton bomb that Perfidious Albion developed to make life miserable for Teutons during the Second Unpleasantness.  Remember?  Good.  Now let's change the subject.
     "Rambo", the 2008 version.  It has bugged your humble scribe that Mister Rambo comes across an unexploded Tallboy in the Burmese jungle, as the RAF never dropped any of these monsters outside Europe.

Tallboy with puny humans for scale

     Sly observes Chekhov's Rule About Guns, because that bomb makes life much, much shorter for a lot of evil minions.  It is barely credible, however, because the South Canadians, with awed respect one hopes, also built a copy of the Tallboy that they named the T121.  No sense of poetry or romance, eh?  It didn't get used in the Second Unpleasantness but you can handwave an explanation about one being dropped in error at a later date.
     Not blowing up straight away is also credible.  The Brylcreem Boys (a.k.a. the RAF) went back to the Sorpe Dam in Germany, the one that had already been hit with bouncing bombs**, and let it have it with a flurry of Tallboys.  One of these did not detonate and was only discovered in 1958 during repair work.

Some very, very careful ordnance experts defusing the monster in 1958

*  I lied about keeping it short.
**  The RAF really, really hated that dam.