Thought Id start this one going because its rather dead on this board at the moment and I suppose all my usual muckers are either at the Stella tennis event watching Dim Tim (lose again) or at Henly Regatta eating cucumber sandwiches (they wish,...NOT).

Anyway please feel free to just talk to yourself blast away and let it go on any company or subject you wish. Just wish Id thought of this one before.

cheers GF.

That poor dog doesn't look too happy Max, grumpy! My two love a bath.

Well ?...who's going to do my backside ?....

(please don't answer that)....

Oh dear...this is getting out of control....euhhh...I couldn't have put it better.....euhhh...watch out for my paws... (menopause)....

.

A Merry Christmas and a happy New Year to one and all.

Live Santa tracker! - Follow Father Chrismas on his journey around the globe

Yes, Father Christmas in on his way – and you can follow his progress live thanks to Norad’s official Santa Tracker.



http://home.bt.com/lifestyle/christmas/live-santa-tracker-follow-father-chrismas-on-his-journey-around-the-globe-11363951484781

Just popped in to have a look to see if anyone else has popped in to have a look.

:-)

just popped in to check the opening time of local hostelries for pre-prandials

Merry Xmas all !..

Merry Christmas all. :-))

Happy crimbo DC.

Happy crimbo to everyone.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b03gm0ym

This is how to save time in the NHS , no need for a mid wife shortage.

ps Merry Christmas to all [ did i say all ] , never mind ITS CHRISTMAS and good will to all men/others

I just spoke to a courier from Yodel, who was making deliveries on Xmas day. I went out for a walk and found Starbucks open plus a few mini supermarkets. All were doing brisk business.

Yes and?... You may have a day off H/S as it's Christmas Day today (and yes we know that you are not into all that like a lot of us) but never the less...

I love Xmas. I just don't subscribe to an artificially created religious festival that was invented to suppress a pagan Roman festival that was even more fun.

Saturnalia was an ancient Roman festival in honor of the deity Saturn, held on the 17th of December of the Julian calendar and later expanded with festivities through to the 23rd of December. The holiday was celebrated with a sacrifice at the Temple of Saturn, in the Roman Forum, and a public banquet, followed by private gift-giving, continual partying, and a carnival atmosphere that overturned Roman social norms: gambling was permitted, and masters provided table service for their slaves. The poet Catullus called it "the best of days."

Back to normal!

Tony Benn, a KGB spy? No, he was far too dangerous for us
Oleg Gordievsky, the KGB's top spy in London, reveals he feared Tony Benn's rise to prominence could destabilise Cold War Britain


By Matthew Holehouse, Political Correspondent7:30AM GMT 26 Dec 2014
To his followers, he was a political giant who kept the red flag flying to the end.
To his detractors, he was the most dangerous man in parliament, who sought to turn Britain into an outpost of the Eastern Bloc and in the process almost destroyed the Labour Party.
And to the KGB, he was major threat to the stability of Cold War Europe and too “stupid” to be recruited as an agent.
For Tony Benn, the former Cabinet minister and Labour radical who died in March this year, was too left wing for the Soviet Union, the KGB’s top agent in London has revealed.
Oleg Gordievsky, who led Soviet intelligence operations in Britain in the 1980s before dramatically defecting to the West, said he was filled with horror at the "catastrophic" prospect of Tony Benn taking the deputy leadership of the Labour Party, fearing it would alter the delicate balance of power in Europe.



It is an admission that will surprise many of his opponents.
Benn’s demand for the nationalisation of industry, trade union power, unilateral disarmament and the abolition of the monarchy turned the 1981 contest against Denis Healey into a bitter and destructive battle for Labour’s soul.
While he was a critic of the USSR’s invasion of Czechoslovakia and human rights abuses, Benn visited Moscow several times as a minister, hailing the “professionalism” of the regime after dining at the Kremlin and the “brilliance” of the space programme.
In 1967, after hosting Premier Kosygin in London, he was granted a rare invitation to attend the May Day Parade in Moscow’s Red Square – a move blocked by diplomats on the grounds it could cause “great political embarrassment”. He was also frequent guest at the Soviet Embassy in London, attending a drinks party there on the night George Blake, the Communist mole in MI6, escaped from Wormwood Scrubs.
Yet, in an interview with The Telegraph, Gordievsky reveals for the first time how Benn was quietly shunned by diplomats as a potential source and his views expunged from spies’ briefings to Moscow after they concluded his observations were nothing more than “left-wing fairytales”.
Gordievsky was a colonel in the KGB and resident-designate in London from 1982 to 1985, in charge of intelligence gathering and espionage against Margaret Thatcher’s government as the Cold War reached its dangerous endgame. Since 1974 he had been working for MI6.
He has always maintained that the late Michael Foot, the Labour leader at the time and Benn’s friend and colleague, had previously worked for the Russians as an “agent of influence”, codenamed Boot. Foot always denied the claim, and successfully sued the Sunday Times for libel.
Benn, by contrast, was regarded after little use, according to Gordievsky, now 76 and living in England. In 2007, he was appointed Companion of the Most Distinguished Order of St Michael and St George (CMG) by the Queen for "services to the security of the United Kingdom''.
A two-and-a-half hour lunch in late 1983 at the Soviet embassy with Benn led Viktor Popov, the ambassador, to declare him unreliable.
At a meeting that December, Popov ordered agents from the KGB, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the military intelligence directorate to remove any information gleaned from Benn from dispatches to Moscow.
“He was not intelligence material,” Gordievsky said in an interview with the Daily Telegraph.
“Popov said, when going through your reports about meetings with different politicians to be sent to Moscow, be careful. Some of them are not truthful. I said, who are you talking about? He said Tony Benn.”
“He was an unnecessary simpleton, who told left-wing fairytales and falsified stories,” Gordievsky concluded.
The view on the Left that he was an intellectual titan was not shared by the Russians, he added.
“He was absolutely unsuitable for political life, and I don’t know why the ambassador invited him to lunch; perhaps because he had the authority of being a major left-wing figure.”
Benn’s diaries confirm he did indeed lunch with Ambassador Popov and Michael Meacher, the Labour left-winger, at the Soviet Embassy in London in October 1983.
They discussed Michael Foot’s correspondence with Andropov, the Soviet leader, asking for his views on Britain abandoning all nuclear weapons ahead of that year’s General Election.
At the meeting Popov told Benn that Soviet intelligence had forewarning of the recent US invasion of Grenada, and they discussed proposals to cut the USSR’s missile stocks.
Two years earlier, Gordievsky claims he over-ruled hardline intelligence officers who wanted to support Benn in the 1981 deputy leadership contest.
By this late era, he emphasises, the KGB no interest in sparking a socialist revolution in Britain, and was focussed preserving the balance of power between the east and west. That meant doing nothing to destabilise either political party.
“The staff of the station, brought up with a very conservative, left-wing position, said gosh, we are going to have a wonderful new deputy head of the Labour Party,” said Gordievsky.
“And I was the only one who said, are you ok in the head? If he is, he will destroy the Labour Party. He will destroy the left-wing in Britain. And some intelligence officers listening to this said, ‘Yes, Oleg, you must be right. It was an excessive expression of our admiration’."
“I sent analysis to Moscow, saying the intention of some Labour supporters to elect Tony Benn would be catastrophic, and very, very dangerous. I was very much caring for the normal political balance of the country."

Former KGB colonel says he paid late union leader Jack Jones £200 for information
Jack Jones was in the pay of the KGB when he was Britain's most powerful union leader, according to a former spy chief.



By Martin Beckford 10:00PM BST 22 Apr 2009
The former general secretary of the Transport and General Workers' Union, who died aged 96 this week, is said to have been paid £200 for collaborating with the Soviet secret service during the Cold War.
Oleg Gordievsky, a KGB colonel who also worked as a double agent for MI5 before becoming the highest-ranking defector to the West, claims he personally gave Jones the money for useful information.
He claims that in 1982 he was posted to London as the Soviet Union's espionage chief in Britain and met Jones – supposedly given the codename Dream – at his flat in south London. By that time he had retired but was still close to key figures in Labour and the trades union movement.
The 70-year-old Russian, who lives in Surrey, says he asked Jones to tell him the names of other left-wingers who would make good recruits for the Soviets.
"For that I paid him £200," Mr Gordievsky told The Daily Telegraph.
He also claimed Jones also passed on intelligence about the leadership of the Labour Party.
Jones was one of Britain's most prominent left-wing figures, having fought in the Spanish Civil War with the International Brigades before becoming head of the TGWU and a confidant of Harold Wilson and Jim Callaghan, the Labour prime ministers.
But he always denied that he helped the Soviets or even met Mr Gordievsky, describing the suggestions as a "slur and an outrage".
"I met Soviet officials at embassies and on visits to Russia on behalf of my members,'' he said when the allegations first surfaced in 1995. "They might have been KGB. I did not realise I was a target. If I had known I was a target for the KGB, or the CIA, I would have had nothing to do with them. I cannot recall any direct approach from the KGB.''
It was later claimed that he had in fact been working for British intelligence, informing of MI5 when Russians approached him.
Mr Gordievsky was in 2007 appointed Companion of the Most Distinguished Order of St Michael and St George (CMG) by the Queen for "services to the security of the United Kingdom''.
A year ago he claimed he had been poisoned by a Russian assassin in a case that echoed the murder of his friend Alexander Litvinenko, another former Russian spy.