Lady of The Mountains

[Lady of The Mountains @a_kindly4242]

@WFP1111 @gromitrocks @BoyGeorge @Bandcamp There's loads of AI stuff on Spotify.

[Wild Boar @WildBoarWisdom]

@PhilipHensher @drianpace I call for the establishment of a statutory body to examine the claims of people whose careers rest on improbable life stories.

It *must*, I repeat *must*, be called “The Walter Mitty Committee”.

Thank you for your attention to this matter.

[B-52 "BUFF" @BoeingB52BUFF]

An F-16 pilot called for a priority landing because his aircraft was running “a bit peaked.” Air traffic control told him that he was number two, behind a B-52 that had one engine shut down.

“Ah,” the F-16 pilot remarked, “The dreaded seven-engine approach.”

[Lady of The Mountains @a_kindly4242]

@Jarrecra @kvnbhrly1 correct. Not only that, the sheer volume of paperwork has skyrocketed. It would stun most people.

[Calum E. Douglas FRAeS @CalumDouglas1]

Top Tip, if you have to start offering your product with a "Switch to Classic View" button, it means your project team are morons and should all be fired for spending a fortune making a product which is shitter than the one you already had and then pissed off all your customers.

[Chris Bolton @CcibChris]

Stalking the runway at RAF Gutersloh

[Chris Bolton @CcibChris]

Some more Victors, they look alien even now, what must people have thought in 1958?

[Lady of The Mountains @a_kindly4242]

@ColourSergeant @DomAdlerUK @BriW74 Oh they do, but the IOPC would be inundated with complaints about them within the first fortnight. Therein lies the rub.

[Dr Helen Fry | WWII Historian @DrHelenFry]

The women who saved D-Day have been erased from history.

While everyone knows Garbo and the male double agents, three brave women were crucial in fooling Hitler before the Normandy landings.

They saved the entire deception at the most critical moment:
(🧵)

[Lady of The Mountains @a_kindly4242]

@Rainmaker1973 One of my favourite hymns. What a wonderful nurse. Absolute credit to her profession.

[Lady of The Mountains @a_kindly4242]

@smfdixon @HiddenHistoryYT Yep that was what I was going to say. U boat tactics. Otto Kreschmer did this. Subs caused massive losses.

[No Context Brits @NoContextBrits]

Let’s get this fucking party started.

[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.

[Lady of The Mountains @a_kindly4242]

@GBPolitcs Good. Sensible and using British workers.

[Lady of The Mountains @a_kindly4242]

@GBPolitcs @JAHeale With the word "taxpayers" emblazoned on it presumably.

[Chris Rose @ArchRose90]

The UK can’t fund our largest telescope for studying space, but we plan to send even more aid to countries with a space programme.

[Lady of The Mountains @a_kindly4242]

This country is hurtling into the bin

[BBC Breaking News @BBCBreaking]

Jodrell Bank, home of UK's largest telescope, facing closure after losing government funding, BBC understands https://t.co/JtcG56lao8

[Lady of The Mountains @a_kindly4242]

@ddsnorth @Telegraph Police cells are single occupancy. Prison cells are shared.

[Lady of The Mountains @a_kindly4242]

@Telegraph I listened to a brilliant woman last week talk about her Ket addiction now she is in recovery. We used to have public information campaigns. The effects of this drug are horrendous. I've seen the results. My heart goes out to this woman. Reclassify it now.

[Lady of The Mountains @a_kindly4242]

@Gadget440 This mental strength stuff he used to bang on about isn't serving him very well is it?