the longest thread, thread - Occasionally NSFW

[targetman377]

Then you should last for several incomprehensible series and lose my interest at about episode 4.

ok jonsey

[shieldgenerator7]

i am lost

tnih: rewsna yek = answer key

[targetman377]

i am lost

tnih: rewsna yek = answer key

i am lazy

[Victor Sullivan]

[bigimg]http://chestofbooks.com/food/household/Woman-Encyclopaedia-4/images/The-Duke-and-Duchess-of-Buccleuch-both-of-whom-have-done-va.png[/bigimg]

[pancakemix]

[targetman377]

good movie!!

[Victor Sullivan]

[bigimg]http://i1025.photobucket.com/albums/y311/Victor_Sullivan/Slide1-14.png[/bigimg]

[targetman377]

Wow the battle for the universe!!!!

[Mr_Adams]

This thread has become indicative of this website. I think it should be moved to General Discussion.

[pancakemix]

good movie!!

Yes indeedy. Best scene right there.

[shieldgenerator7]

[bigimg]http://i1025.photobucket.com/albums/y311/Victor_Sullivan/Slide1-14.png[/bigimg]

lshicastr- lack has so much of a better chance

[targetman377]

good movie!!

Yes indeedy. Best scene right there.

I like when he puts music on earphones and makes him read.

[targetman377]

not too much activity in here today

[jonesthecurl]

Busy.
Just come back from a storytelling contest. Good fun.

[Army of GOD]

Just came back from listening to a bunch of people telling me stories.

[targetman377]

Busy.
Just come back from a storytelling contest. Good fun.

STORY TIME STORY STORY STORY TIME!!!!!!!!! PLEASE BEFORE BED PLEASE!!!

[targetman377]

Just came back from listening to a bunch of people telling me stories.

Did you sit around a campfire?

[targetman377]

hi!!!

[Victor Sullivan]

Busy.
Just come back from a storytelling contest. Good fun.

Oo, do tell!

[targetman377]

sets up a fire me an victor sit around it waiting for jonsey!!!

[jonesthecurl]

OK - here's the story I told.
I have to say I was expecting it to be more like the events I used to attend at various music festivals, where you told stories like John Hurt in The Storyteller, but everyone seemed to do readings from their book-in-progress, usually autobiographical. So I compromised.


This story is about my Dad.
The kids call him "Tadcu"*, which is Welsh for "Grandad", because he asked them to, because he is Welsh.
At the end of this year he will be 90 years old.
Now if you do the maths, you'll quickly see that he reached the age of 18 in 1939, shortly after Britain declared war on Germany.
He had no great reason to be loyal to the English parliament - the government of the day was doing its best to completely eradicate Welsh culture. If you spoke Welsh in school you'd be beten with a stick by the teachers in front of the whole school. It's different now, they make all the kids learn Welsh - and half of them hate it.
Nevertheless, he didn't like the look of Hitler and his Nazis, so he joined the Army.
After a few months training, he boarded a troop ship (he was the youngest aboard) headed for the North African Desert.
Now at this time, the Germans had a considerable presence in the Mediterranean,and a lot of U-boats in the Atlantic, so the troop ships took the long way around- far to the west for the trip south, then all the way around the bottom of Africa and back up the East coast to end in Egypt.
But he didn't get that far, not this time: his ship was torpedoed.
The fact that I'm standing here telling you this shows that he survived, and met my mother, so don't get too anxious at this point.
At first they thought his ship would sink, so everybody was evacuated onto lifeboats.
The next morning, after a damn cold night, the boat was still afloat, and help had arrived. The troops all got back aboard, and the disabled ship was towed off to the friendly port of Halifax in Nova Scotia, where the guys were billetted with local families for as long as it took to get a replacement ship, not already committed, to them. So they had several months of unexpected and very pleasant shore leave.
Eventually he was taken via Cape Town and Mombasa to the desert. There he fought in many famous and nasty battles such as Tobruk and El Alemein. Eventually he fought in Sicily and Italy, including the bloody affair at Monte Cassino. He never talks much about that part of his experiences.
But he survived unscathed, met and married a nice Cockney girl, and that's how I'm here now.
Many years later he was working for British Petroleum in London. He'd been a cop for some years, then moved onto Security work, then became a Fire Safety Officer for B.P.
He's always hated the idea of office work, he couldn't see what it contributed to anything - but they fooled him, got him to start lecturing about fire safety, promoted him when he turned out to be quite good at it, and gave him his own office.
So he needed some "executive training" - you know the sort of thing, they do interesting group exercises where you have to trust people to catch you, and you get asked leading questions like "If you were a fizzy drink, what flavour would you be?" and "if you jumped out of a plane , what colour parachute would you want?".
This particularl bloke asked everyone to write down what they would want if they were shipwrecked, One item, but anything they liked. Then the class would discuss the various choices and their significance.
Someone said a picture of their family, someone wanted their favourite book, another wanted a sketch pad to while away the time.
When the lecturer came to my father's answer, it said "A bottle of whisky".
"Oh come now, Mr Jones, " said the bloke, "I don't think you're taking this very seriously. You can have anything you want. Can't you think of anything more useful?"
[Welsh accent] "Have you every been shipwrecked?"[/Welsh accent]
"No."
[Welsh accent] "Well, I have. It was bloody cold, and what I wanted was a bottle of bloody whisky!"[/welsh accent]

*pronounced "Tad-ki".

[targetman377]

nice thats a great story!!!!

[Army of GOD]

tl;dr

[Victor Sullivan]

Very nice.

[jonesthecurl]

Go read it AoG.
After all, it's a short story.