Xanda

mind your own business

[Xanda @Xanda73]

@jagarikin Because you are looking at it too closely.

Move away from the image and it's obvious.

[Xanda @Xanda73]

@Lywz3581 No - particularly with Prost. He's on record as saying he would never drive a F1 car ever again, after Sennas death. He later broke that promise, for which I've never forgave him. Mansell just had ideas of gradure.

[Xanda @Xanda73]

@gosforthandy @IKEAUK This is a 3.5" hard drive platter. Things are not always what they seem...

[Xanda @Xanda73]

@aestheticsguyy

[Gijs de Reijke @GijsDeReijke]

Four years of planning the shots paid off.

#EclipseEspaña #Eclipse

[Xanda @Xanda73]

I didn't get a picture of the eclipse, but here's one of the Moons shadow, from the island of Capri.

[Xanda @Xanda73]

@lady_valor_07 Nothing. We had to put 50p in the TV to make it work.

[Xanda @Xanda73]

@superowls11 @gsmales The XR3i of the same year was terrible. Rock solid ride and no performance.

[Xanda @Xanda73]

Drinks in Capri then.

[Xanda @Xanda73]

@PentagramMsport As sad as it is, the ST kid has come out of that as the winner, in his generation.

I totally get why you’re proud of your kid though for his part.

[Xanda @Xanda73]

@Gav_Griffiths Nobody wants a Grifter. You were a laughing stock if you had a Grifter, rather than any BMX, round my way.

Now, a Burner with mag wheels...

[Xanda @Xanda73]

@redbites @graeme_cobb The front and the wheels and the colour. I've had a Puma ST (and Fiesta & Focus STs) but won't go near these, not because they are electric but because they are hideous looking.

[Xanda @Xanda73]

@DeputyGrocott An hundred? Seven? Stupid.

[Xanda @Xanda73]

@pmtiegs Aeroplanes though...

[Xanda @Xanda73]

@rayontrack If he smashes it and pulls out drives undeserving of the car and hustles faster cars into mistakes to get by - then yes absolutely. If they give him a rocket ship that nobody right can get near - then no.

[Xanda @Xanda73]

@FvdE Got spanked at touring cars. For me, indicative of his true driving skill.

[Xanda @Xanda73]

@RussBrookes1981 Oh my god mate - so so sorry for your loss. They are no words.

[Mike Bales 🫡🇺🇸 @MikeBales]

Why does everyone force introverts to leave their comfort zone, but no one forces extroverts to shut the f*ck up for a while?

[Voices of WW2 @VoicesofWW2]

Seventy-two. That is how many separate wounds John Cruickshank had in him, two of them through his lungs, while he lined up a burning flying boat for a second run at a U-boat that had just shot his aircraft to pieces. Most men have one of those wounds and they are finished. He had seventy-two and he pressed the attack.

He was 24, a former bank clerk from Aberdeen, flying a Catalina flying boat out of the Shetland Islands with Coastal Command. The job was the long, freezing, mind-numbing patrol, fourteen hours over the grey Atlantic hunting the U-boats that were strangling Britain. On the 17th of July 1944, far out over empty water, they caught one on the surface, U-361, and Cruickshank took the big slow flying boat down to attack.

The first run failed. The depth charges would not release. Any sane man makes a note and turns for home. Cruickshank swung the aircraft around and came back for a second pass, low and straight, and this time the submarine's gunners were waiting. Flak ripped through the Catalina. It killed the navigator, wounded half the crew, and tore into Cruickshank again and again, those seventy-two wounds, two punching into his lungs, ten into his legs.

And he flew the attack home anyway. Bleeding everywhere, in agony, with the fuselage holed and on fire, he held the aircraft dead level, aimed, and released the depth charges himself. They straddled the U-boat perfectly. It broke apart and sank beneath him.

Then came the part that should have killed him. He collapsed from blood loss, and the wounded co-pilot, who had never landed a Catalina, took the controls for the long flight back. Cruickshank refused the morphine that would have knocked him out, because he knew the man flying needed him. Drifting in and out, he had himself carried back up to the cockpit again and again through the night to help nurse the shot-up aircraft down, and at dawn they got it onto the water safely. He had lost so much blood the doctors said he had no business being alive.

He lived. He took the Victoria Cross from the King, went quietly back to banking after the war, and rarely spoke of it. And he kept on living, and living, and living. John Cruickshank died in 2025 at the age of 105, the last man on earth wearing a Victoria Cross earned in the Second World War. Seventy-two wounds over the Atlantic, and he outlasted every other hero of that war by decades.

[Xanda @Xanda73]

@lady_valor_07 I'm with the Woolwich.