I Fort So

 NO! 

<quivers with incandescent rage> That is neither a typo nor a resort to gutter slang as in the Cockney argot.  It is a pun, and a funny one at that.

     First, an aside.  "What did you do with your time off, Conrad?" people at work will ask.  Well, aside from getting up late and drinking tea for England, I have been diligently reading (Professor) William Philpott's "Attrition".  Art?

Neither short nor simple

         It's rather too long to sum up in a single sentence.  What the Prof seeks to assert and prove is that attritional warfare was the only logical consequence of how war could be fought at the time, and that the strategy of going for an all-out knockout blow was a chimera (not a word you expected to see today, hmmm?).  The nation-states of Europe could mobilise armies that numbered in the millions, and keep them in the field at that numerical level by conscripting levies in the millions, too.  Given this, it is easy to see with hindsight that no single battle, nor series of battles, would inflict fatal casualties upon any of the major belligerents.

The Royal Artillery sending the kaiser a little message

     Ol' Phil underlines what Haigy said: there was of necessity a wearing-down process at work, as the Tueton army was gradually whittled away.  The trick was to manage this without getting 'whittled away' oneself.

     Back to our headline.  Okay, the owner of a series of sea-forts off the coast of Portsmouth has decided to sell them, according to an article on the BBC website.  Two of them are now hotels, though what you'd do once inside is a moot point, and the third is an undeveloped shambolic derelict.  Art?

Built to defy the French

     Let's have a look at Spitbank, shall we?  Art!

A name to conjure with ...

As you can plainly see, once you're there, you're there.  How about a glimpse of Horse Sands Fort, Art?

Bit of a fixer-upper

     I don't think it's up to stopping an invasion by the M8s any longer, to be honest.  Great zombie refuge, too, until the food runs short.  Maybe you could fish?

     The really relevant one I wanted to mention is No Man's Fort.  Art?

Advertised as a wedding venue, somewhat oddly

     As you should realise by now, Conrad has a mind like a skip, which is to say both capacitous and devoid of order.  Still, a memory did pop up in his mind, about the BBC's premier dramamentary series "Doctor Who" back in the Seventies with the Third iteration.  Art?

Can't find an image from 1971

     This is No Man's Fort, where the Doctor and Jo are stranded when their boat explodes - as boats are wont to do - and they come face to face with one of the marine Silurians dubbed the "Sea Devils", though Your Humble Scribe knew them in his own inimitable way as the "Parrot Pigs".  Art?

I think you see my point.
(Also, how insouciant is the Doctor!)

     The three forts in the diagram above are now up for sale, and if you happen to have £9 million lying around, why!  you're in luck.

     Motley!  Fire up the gene-splicing drive in the lab, we're going to try a bit of cross-breeding ...

Conrad: Arch-Anorak

Your Humble Scribe thinks the anorak is a stylish and functional article.  So there.  He is also one of those dinosaurs who makes physical longhand notes, with a pen, on paper, and I have proof.  Art?

     From port at top, that's a note to remind me to look up a couple of books that were mentioned on the "We Have Ways ..." podcast.  If I don't write it down, I won't remember it.  Below that is a separate list I made out which is a little tricky to read.  It's a list of comics that Brian Michael Bendis recommended, and which I ought to have taken with me when I tootled along to "Travelling Man", and now I'm going to have to check them all out via Google-fu.  O how onerous.

     To starboard is a set of notes I made whilst re-listening to WHW's broadcast with Tom Holland, and whilst on that subject -

Hitler, Sparta, Athens And Rome ("We Have Ways -" With Jim's Bro)

Tom recounted that the Nazis were generally big fans of Sparta, especially their attitude towards their slave class, the helots.  Remember when I said that, to prove how manly you were in Sparta, you had to go kill a helot?  Conrad was half-remembering.  Apparently, to get into the Spartan Secret Society, you had to kill any uppity helot, because they only wanted dull, submissive, subservient helots.  Of course this creates a problem if you want to get into the Secret Society and there aren't any uppity helots; one doubts this would stymie a Spartan for long.

Helots not enjoying life

     Herr Schickelgruber, of course - obviously! - doted on the Spartans, and considered them the most perfectly racist society evah.  Others, like that sack of evil in human shape Heydrich, saw the Spartan model of society as the future for all the subjugated Slavs "There is no future for the Czechs" as he opined and meant.

     We shall definitely come back to this, not least because I made notes.

Finally -

We only need a short item to hit the Compositional Ton, so here goes.

     Conrad does not drive to work, as it is far more convenient to get the bus - no problems about doing a crossword or reading a book on the bus, which is a rather fraught process when driving a car.  In fact the only time he uses the car is on a Wednesday afternoon or evening, when he does the weekly shop.

     Yes yes yes, I'm getting to the point.  PATIENCE!  I'm building a mise en scene, if you must know.  Art?

     This is unusual enough that I thought to record it, as 11,111 more miles need to elapse before we hit 33,333 miles.

     

     And with that we are done done done, so much so that I can't be bottomed to change this font back to Verdana.