Cycle one complete, my parent fails & Alexa back in the good books!

The Mummy Diaries

IT’S BEEN a couple of weeks since my last blog. I’d like to give you a better excuse other than I just didn’t have time, but I can’t. I ...

Musings of a REAL Tank Commander – Part 8 Drinking on the job and getting singed

IT’S HIGH TIME I talked about the boys. Other Scottish regiments might have called them the Jocks, but to us in the 4 RTR Officers’ Mess they were always “the boys”. And they still are, ...

ThinkMovies: Five movies that are far better than they should be

HAVE YOU EVER gone with low expectations to the cinema (Remember them? From before time, from long, long ago?) As a critic, I do my best to avoid going in with preconceptions or prejudice, it’s ...

Musings of a REAL Tank Commander – Part 7 Ripping it up in a Chieftain

IT’S THE SEVENTH episode of this never-ending saga and only now am I turning to tanks and what it was like being a tank soldier in the last two decades of the 20th century, which ...

ThinkMovies: The five worst movies ever

PERHAPS it’s because I’m circling my thirty-second birthday, or perhaps it’s the prolonged effects of this dratted lockdown, but I have felt a significant pain of late that I attribute to an over-abundance of bile ...

Is there light at the end of the tunnel? Going grey and life is a rollercoaster!

The Mummy Diaries

THERE MAY just be a glimmer of hope! We may actually be starting the long process of coming out of lockdown and this will be done gradually. We are ...

Musings of a REAL Tank Commander: Part 6 Some regimental history

AS I SAID in the last episode, I thought it might be useful for the casual reader if I were to look in a little bit more detail at the history of the #BARITWE (Best ...

ThinkMovies: The double feature List

THE DOUBLE FEATURE, the showing of two full-length movies back-to-back, is a bit of a cinematic anachronism these days. To modern cinema goers, it belongs to a time of reasonably priced snacks, smoke-filled screens without ...

Lockdown life, naughty Daddy and Jingle Bells in April!

The Mummy Diaries

ANOTHER WEEK in lockdown survived. I actually think the kids are at the point now of just accepting this as their new life. Jamie hasn’t asked to go to ...

Musings of a REAL Tank Commander – Part 5 One flew over the Officers' Mess

IT’S HARD TO EXPLAIN why and when things sometimes just exploded, often literally. It could happen because it was someone’s birthday, or somebody was being posted away or leaving altogether, or sometimes just because the ...

A teetotal lockdown, avoiding A&E and “love you too Mummy!”

The Mummy Diaries

WELL, it’s been a slightly better week than the last one but let’s face it, the only way was up!

After hitting rock bottom last week, ...

Musings of a REAL Tank Commander – Part 4 Work, idleness and hedonistic madness

WHAT FOLLOWS BELOW is an attempt to describe what it was like being a young-ish, single, junior officer in a Germany-based Scottish armoured regiment in the 1980s. I hardly know where to begin to be ...