Peter Rhodes on a speculative fire, a misnamed gun and still no defeat for Putin
Yuletides are getting much of a muchness, all muggy, fuggy and tepid, with few blizzards or hurricanes to distinguish one from another.
For a few hours recently, the latest one looked like being distinguished as “The Christmas when Blackpool Tower burned down.” Fortunately, the “flames” reported by passers-by in the Lancastrian resort were no more than plastic strips blowing in the wind. Hindsight is a wonderful thing; it looked like a fire to me.
My eye was caught by a news report concerning an Abbot self-propelled gun (or “tank” as most reports misnamed it). This 1960s Abbot was parked outside a kitchen supplier in Basingstoke to draw attention to the owner's long-running dispute with the company.
Images of the Abbot took me back to an argument on a drive across Salisbury Plain one golden evening in the 1980s. I was a young TA officer, my passenger was a dour old staff sergeant. Suddenly on the reddening horizon, a vehicle appeared, parked in a field with its barrel pointing at the sky.
“That's a US M90 mobile howitzer,” I declared, knowledgeably.
“No, it's a British Abbot self-propelled gun,” he snapped. The staff-sergeant was never one to avoid an argument.
“M109,” I repeated. “You can tell by the long barrel.”
“Abbot,” he insisted. “You can tell by the height of the turret.”
“M109.”
“Abbot.”
“Take it from me it's a bloody M109.”
“It's a ****ing Abbot,” retorted the staff-sergeant.
The spat fell into sullen silence for some time until, at a field entrance, we finally got a close view of the vehicle and a positive identification. It was a combine harvester.
Meanwhile, still on a military theme and as the second anniversary of Putin's invasion of Ukraine approaches, remember how the “experts” predicted it would develop? By now, we were assured, Putin would be running out of roubles, manpower and missiles. Instead, his war-economy is booming, his ranks are filled with mercenaries and he has more than enough missiles to launch blitzes on an almost daily basis.
And what became of those many and varied fatal diseases Putin was said to be suffering? He must be the fittest dying man in Europe.
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