Looks like he'll be busy a while.

Yes, a pity. And the series had been going so well. East coast raid and Falklands drama, Dogger Bank palate cleanser, U-boat subplot. Oh well.

To be fair they've never forgiven themselves for spending a literal century of episodes building up to Trafalgar 2 and then damp squibbed the Jutland series finale.

The Yeltsin 3000

Somehow it was both mortifyingly awkward but also very sad.

he would inevitably be pressured to drink. Might have been a crisis call and so the lady might not have been able to avoid answering, but I thought she could have got off at a quiet stop rather than broadcast this man's misery to 30-odd people.

Reminds me of being on a tram when I realised that another passenger, a woman, was some kind of alcohol dependency counsellor and was conducting a therapy session for a client over the phone. Entire carriage heard about hw this distressed man was being pressured to attend some family gathering where

It's called the Public Order Act but could have been called 'Fuck Off, Blackshirts'.

For no reason, I'm reminding of going to a local football match where a section of the crowd took a dislike of one of the stewards, and started chanting 'You're just a prick in a jacket'.

On the plus side, if it were to explode, Southend might briefly have a space program.

Meanwhile plugging the name Astronomer back into the IWM catalogue turns up this: a ship model showing how Astronomer was dazzle-painted in the latter part of the First World War. A neatly circular bit of research!

Pic: IWM MOD 2087 / www.iwm.org.uk/collections/...

Seems like a good match, I think.

That name then gives you the Clyde Ships website, giving a pretty detailed history of the vessel, including its fate - torpedoed and sunk by a U-boat south of Wick in June 1940.

www.clydeships.co.uk/view.php?ref...

Assuming GQNT was the ship's callsign gets you to this page from the Alphabetical List of British Registered Steam Vessels, part of the 1931 Mercantile Navy list, digitised by the Memorial University of Newfoundland.

GQNT: SS Astronomer, built 1917.

collections.mun.ca/digital/coll...

Running these signal flags against the International Code of Signals gives a four-letter code: GQNT.

In Goldeneye Brosnan always seems to be trying to split the difference between Moore Camp and Dalton Machismo, it's great.

Let he who hasn't rested his scrotum on a tortoise cast the first stone.

Dog fouling is one of those things that could be eliminated by technology and a few exemplary punishments.

People leave crap *near* a bin, shrug, and tell themselves they've done their bit because eventually someone will come and tidy up after them. Ten seconds later the wind is blowing their burger box into a hedge or a river.