Parish Notices
Thanks for material since the last Lobster to, Robin Whittaker (clipper-in-chief), Jane Affleck, Anthony Carew, Harry Irwin, Harlan Girard, Steve Wright and John Booth.
Corrections
I get surprisingly few anonymous or abusive letters but I got a corker after Lobster 34. The anonymous and abusive author pointed out that in my review of the John Newsinger book on the SAS I had written that in Gulf War 1:
‘All Britain could muster was one tank regiment and a handful of Tornado aircraft which crashed with alarming regularity doing low-level bombing missions for which they had not been designed.’
As the anonymous author pointed out, this description is false. The author cited General Norman Scwarzkopf’s book to demonstrate that it wasn’t a tank regiment but a division, and adds that the RAF actually had 69 aircraft at the conflict.
You would think that after doing this for nearly fifteen years I would have learned not to rely on my memory. So, mea culpa, at one level. At another, my point, inaccurate though it was, remains: all Britain could muster were one tank division and 69 aircraft.
The Net
The obvious change in Lobster in the past year is the increasing input from the Internet. The gag that the Internet is this (or last) year’s CB radio is quite wrong. There is a great deal of information out there and an increasing volume of it is good information. I could easily fill an issue of Lobster from good material which is on Web sites. (And I’m not sure why I don’t….) But this is an expensive hobby in this country. (In the US most Internet use is free because most local calls are free.)
Prawn Cocktail Party
There isn’t much from me in this issue because I spent much of the past few months working on a book. This was published in May by Vision Paperbacks as Prawn Cocktail Party. On which please note the following.
- At least 60% of the material in this book has appeared in various guises in issues of Lobster or in the special issue, The Clandestine Caucus.
- The book is a mess. Trying to get it out quickly, the publisher skipped the proof-copy stage and I was unable to check their setting of material I had sent by e-mail. As well as sundry minor errors, the footnotes to three of the chapters have been scrambled.
As usual, pieces without an author have been written by me.
Robin Ramsay
Lobster is edited and published by:
Robin Ramsay at 214 Westbourne Avenue, Hull, HU5 3JB. UK
Tel: 01482 447558. e-mail:
Web site at http://www.knowledge.co.uk/xxx/lobster/
ISSN: 0964-0436
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