please empty your brain below

"And next time I'm woken by a low flying helicopter, I will at least know precisely who to blame."

BBC / Sky / Police / HEMS I presume?
How DO you get to know about all these visiting opportunities and find the time to partake DG? Surely there must be two of you, and a secretary tucked away at home somewhere to arrange it all.

I may have (sort of) beaten you to this one as HMS Ocean glided past our office window about 8pm on Friday and as I was just leaving I managed to follow her to Greenwich by bus and see the tugs manoeuvring her into position.

Stunning!
@Stephen: I've been thinking the same thing!
With 10 years of training behind him, DG will shortly embark on his greatest blog challenge yet - solo coverage of London's Olympic month, with no funding and no resources except his own. Good luck DG, we'll be cheering you on.
I guess you were to old to enlist, maybe some of the youngsters will consider a Naval Career after their visit to the ship. A good public relations event as I imagine some of the residents in those Thames side apartments are not to keen on having a warship moored outside.
"Potentially shooty-things".

That's why I come to this blog - for the expert commentary.
And of course it's reassuring to know that if some lunatic straps explosives to himself and boards a bus, the navy can send in a force of attack helicopters and blow the bus and all surrounding traffic to smithereens before he causes any trouble. I feel so much safer now.
Thanks for the link - I agree with you about the security. I hope they do a more thorough job when they're manning the checkpoints into the Olympic Park (which they already are if the report by the BBC from there this morning is anything to go by).

Whatever their level of competence, they're a lot better trained than their civilian counterparts though, and if all else fails they do have big assault rifles. I just hope we don't have any 'incidents' - there's enough crap flying in the direction of the armed forces already.
To be honest, I'm not really surprised they were perfectly happy to let visitors get close up and take pictures of all the equipment. None of it is particularly secret and fairly detailed information on things like the helicopters is publicly available already. A potential terrorist 'casing the joint' in preparation for trying to shoot one down would still have to overcome the fact that the chopper has sophisticated defence and weapon systems and is quite capable of taking care of itself.
I totally agree about the security checks for getting on board. I was stunned at how lax it was. Getting into the corporate games media centre in westminster was 10x as stringent as getting onto the RNs flag ship.










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