Britains Steepest Road?

I saw this on the BBC about a road which was at a 40% angle in Harlec, Wales... https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-45420155

You know what?  I think Nottingham has a contender to beat it, if it counts... Newfield Road.

Specifically the curve at the western end of that road, it's immensely steep, very short and I believe carries you up around 24 meters in around 60 meters of distance which is 40% in my book.

There's also a road I don't know the actual name of in Gedling (which my driving instructer used to torture me doing uphill starts) he called it "Big Bertha".

Is is Filmable? Red-Storm Rising

I've often asked this question "is it filmable", such as the age old argument that the Lord of the Rings was not filmable before Peter Jackson proved that theory wrong... Sort of (cough).

So what don't I think is filmable?  Well, the Tom Clancy novel "Red Storm Rising".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Storm_Rising

I really like this book, I read it every couple of years and get really engrossed in the concept of what a war in the Europe of my youth would have been actually like.

Remember, I'm a kid who played on the beaches of Skegness (in the UK) when A10 Warthogs were flying low over the coastline in dummy strafing runs, we could find spent 50'cal bullets (metal and a stone line practice bullet too) from their activities and we read up avidly about the new to service Tornado jet.

I have a vivid and expectant concept of that that war might have been, everything from blistering nuclear instant death, to a lingering radioactive malaise, to the starvation induced strangling of Britain's sea-trade by the Red menace.

We all know it never came to pass, but this novel visualizes it, you get the interspersed stories from a single tank commander, to the infantry on the ground, A10 pilots are mentioned and the desperate struggle of the high-seas as well as the personal impact on civilians on Iceland.

Could it ever be filmed?  Certainly the CG is out there to allow it, and perhaps convincingly, so technically yes this story could be told on screen.

The question therefore is should it be made?  With the current resurgence in an autocratic mind-set from Russian voters you could argue that the days gone-by of the Soviet regime are actually echo'd on the streets of Moscow today, but that feeling is tempered a much more cosmopolitan mixing of peoples and business, even organised crime.  All completely change the social-political landscape of Russia.

What was once a far-away distant disturbing land, is still very far away and still disturbing, but it's far far less distant, we can all connect to Russian news, feel the pulse of Russian politics.  We all even watched their invasion (yes I'm afraid I sit on the fence of it being an invasion) of the Crimea, literally taking it from Ukraine.

A moment of pride to some I'm sure, but a sign of things to come?  Maybe, I never felt that was a war which would go hot, I don't think anyone in the west had the stomach for a war with Russia, submarines off the coast of Sweden, incursions into Ukraine and the murder of airline passengers all passed without serious repercussions.

But you film Red Storm Rising, you put that story out there, from the perspective given in the book.  I think that would get serious repercussion and denounced in the Russian press as scare mongering, I really do.

That's why its unfilmable, because Russia.

People : British Baby Boomer Bullshit

I'm going to talk about someone I know, whom I have known all my life, they consider themselves to have been brought up without the advantages of a modern childhood (my birth in the late 1970's and childhood in the 1980's being considered modern to their birth in the mid-1950's).

They once spoke to me about my having advantages they don't... That I could get work, when they couldn't (at least not at the time - the 1990's) and I admit that with the closure of the coal industry, the privitazation of Rail and Telecomms many "normal" routes of general employment of the British worker of yester-year were curtailed; though not closed off; in the 1990's.

But, I was still a kid, I didn't go to university until 1996, and I officially didn't graduate (despite working in the IT industry from 1998) until 2000.

All the time I struggled to keep myself in work, and have been now gainfully employed fulltime since 1998, no mean feat between Brexit today and the dot com bubble burst at the time of my graduation.

So, what was this persons point?... Well, their point was "We kids of the Baby Boom, were only had to replace the war dead, our parents had no interest in us".

They repeated this mantra in several slight variations for many years, and it always struck me as odd, even as a kid.  Because I had read the history of the second world war, and here in Britain we can only count about 350,000 service personnel killed (328,600 according to wikipedia) and there were only 67,100 civilian dead, a total less than half a million people.  Tragic, but nowhere near enough to warrant a ten year population boom from 1945 to 1955 of around 800,000 births per year.

A birth trend which went on for a peak of over 1 million live births in 1963.

That's millions more people, which this one person justified their upbringing as warranted for the loss of less than half a million lives in a war?  A war which predates them by a decade?

Strange thinking... And only now, in the internet age can one really turn around and challenge such strange miss-conceptions, no you didn't have a poor childhood, we're on the cusp of living our days where the current generations are for the first time earning less per capita than the previous, that is only now, nearing seventy years since your birth, that's generations before now which have enjoyed living well.

Brexit brings uncertainty, our special relationship with the USA; ironically fostered during the Second World War; is one life-line we have, but the youth of today can't point to the Falklands conflict or the First Gulf War and complain that their birth was accelerated by a necessity to respawn the population after a devastation.

Such devastation of the population has not happened since the First World War and the following Spanish Flu epidemic.

Could it happen again?  Perhaps... Will I be contributing children to repopulate?  No.  And will I cry that today we have iPads whilst when I was born we didn't even have an Apple 2?... No, of course I won't.