Right Lads, gather round for a Tool Talk.
Item 1: The Chief is in his funnel suite, leave him there.
Item 2: There is no need for an Item 2.
Item 3: See Item 1.

OK back to work.

Steward! double off up to the funnel suite. see to it that Tmac gets everything he wants. I want him well fed and his strength back asap. Oh and take a case of Black Bush up to him as well Please.

Sreward!. up to the Funnel suite on the double. make sure Tmac has everything he needs and take a case of Black Bush with you. I want him well fed and fit asap!

Funnel Suite, Funnel Suite, so good they named it twice.

And his two rats living in squalor.

Squalor, you mean the small village between Carrick and Whitehead?

EXCUSE MOI !!!! if I was you I would take special care of my nuts.... Eric is a SQUIRREL and therefore takes great exception to being called a rat. Any subsequent damage to your nether regions, in particular your nut sack is your own responsibility. :shock::shock:

Eric is a sensitive soul not normally given to violence but to be accused of being a rat in a fur coat brings out the RAMBO in him :shock:

This is not covered in the Articles I signed. It is either an Extra Curricular Activity or an Overtime earner. Make your choice but if it is overtime I want time and a half and double time on a Sunday. Bosun bring me a tin of that doorstep polish, Mansion I believe.
And a gallon of Jeyes Fluid, just in case.

A gallon? That's not going to look good on our bar bill. Not after you commandeered every bottle of the vintage Brasso before any of the rest of us got so much as a shot-glassfull.

For the youngsters a gallon is 8 pints, a lunchtime session, or 4 and a half litres. Split between us it will barely show on the bar bill and no one will deny us a Jorum of Jeyes.

Its Friday evening and all's quiet, come on down to the Bar Varl and we'll go on the tear or tare? Bugger it we'll go on the piss. T can join us if he can tear (again) himself away from the dammed Saw Jigs he's so poor at. P&O Tony and the Lancs have the beating of him every time, God help him and JustWin sniggering in the background.
Its all too much, I'll break out the leftover Bristol Cream to add a little "Top Table" to the evening. What say you?

I would have joined you but during quarantines we have Zoomtails at 1800z of a Friday. In lieu of Lunch.

(8 pints at lunchtime. You have a good memory).

Lightweight, ES I am surprised at your lack of liquid capacity:confused: 8 pints to a H&W man is merely a dust remover from the back of the throat before partaking of "yer piece" (luncheon to the uninitiated) For a man from the "oul sod" you can do better than that lad :applause:

You have I fear been led astray by that Varley chappie and his exotic concoctions doubtless an IoM delicacy designed to confuse the unwary :cloud:

Stick to the pints lad, you know it makes sense :pint:

I managed about 7 pints (perhaps more) when over the wall one Saturday. On the way back one schoolmate (now retired Commodore RN) was rolling about in the middle of the road as high as a kit. Me, the model of sobriety.

An hour or so later the situation was reversed with him apparently sober and me caught practicing R/T distress procedure on the GWT with my housemaster looking on. "I'm afraid I am a little drunk, Sir". "It doesn't take much intellectual thought to work that one out matey!"

(I don't think the Chief's description of fine dining at H&W recommends itself for entry in Michelin's Guide although it might make to the AA's).

I have to stand up and defend the Thermos and Piece Box and, at the same time, the flat cap and muffler. But I do get the impression that twenty past five was a "Bowler" man and ate in the Staff Dining Room.
Inglis's sliced loaf made into cheese pieces or egg and scallions or soda and wheaten bread with red jam and two custard creams, you couldn't beat it.
I'm not au-fait with gourmet eating on IOM but I'd be surprised if it riz above scabby kippers. Oh by the way Facebook is now full of retired Commodores denying they ever knew you. An own goal and probably a Red Card.

And HP Sauce on the cheese piece. No expense spared.

Cheese and Jam - Don't knock it till you try it.

Where is the Vegemite?

Stuck in Oz, same as many tennis players.

Vegemite is a bit of an acquired taste, same-same Marmite and it would slop around the Piece Box and ruin the gourmet cold fried egg sandwiches, cut into triangles.

now I will Sulk. Cant get Vegemite here in the Philippines. need someone to visit here from Oz to bring me some.

The tennis players .......
Oh dear, how sad, too bad, never mind.
$ Oz 100,000 for just showing up, 5 star hotel, everything provided. Plus $$$$ thousands more if they win anything beyond the first game.
Just waiting for the government to cave in to their demands.:yawn:

Perhaps I need educating but Philippine tucker was mild curry and pineapple upside down cake. On a par with Aussie scran. Vindaloo need not apply.

It looks as if we might have a hum dinger of a charter there then. Is there anywhere else where we could make a killing with a cargo or two of antipodean pseudo Marmite?

Commodores do Facething?

Some would say Queenies are the Island's piece of resistance, but the gourmet may indeed find a bistro serving arenque ahumado a caballo. Personally I don't 'do' either but, then, neither do I do butties filled with triangular slices of cold fried egg.

Arenque ahumado a caballo is Manx'ese for scabby kippers. You really must educate your palate, be like 20 past 5 and have a different filling in your piece every day.

Commodores are funny things, a one Star in the RN is a totally different animal to a Commodore in, say, Denholms or BP. Generally a wanker and a waste of rations.

Google doesn't help me with 1720. Not sure if relevant as that is not even time for the pre-prandial tincture.

My palate left school with me and, hardly maturing any more surely, has only clasped coffee; caviar; jamon iberico; Grappa and Calvados to its bosom since (and the last two now denied me).

Eglefino ahumado poached in milk remains a breakfast favourite although, whilst Nanny would have allowed pepper (even black pepper had it been in the shops in those days), instead I now use chilli-milk which I doubt she would have countenanced. It should ideally be a commodore fish, the whipper snappers, short of their 10 years at four rings, are too skinny.

Mind you, I have noticed a certain lack of height in the stature of some very senior RN types (is there a NATO equivalent to Screaming Willie's orange box I wonder).

As I recall my schoolmate was not, then, a towering figure but perhaps he still had a year or so's development in hand. He was and remains good at hockey (and, I am sure, much seastuff else), perhaps that is because he is still quite close to the turf?

KGFS Trafalgar Ball's guest of honour a year or so ago was the First Sea Lord. He did not buck that trend (but did manage the lectern without orangeboxed matelot in tow).

Hot fried eggs anybody?
Perhaps you are like the late Princess Margaret and only eat "Buttered Eggs".

An egg banjo! Yummy!
Everyone wants poached eggs nowadays and it's not the same...
I wonder what an egg banjo with eggs Benedict would be like.....

You have solved a riddle. Our Chinese cooks always produced scrambled egg that looks like a sample of Googled 'buttered egg'. I had been satisfied to think these were simply done partway as an omelette and then whisked about with a chop stick or two. I now feel very privileged to understand that they were all trained by Margaret Rose, lately HRH the Princess.

The conundrum precipitated by this discovery is the ubiquity of Chinese cooks that 1) produced scrambled eggs as above and, 2) could not make decent bread.

Did HRH discard her Chinese cheferie on discovering that they all did good eggs but hard bread or did they resign because she wouldn't play pretend cricket with the luncheon rolls?

In Craig Browns book, Ma'am Darling: HRH Margaret was not a fan of Mothers Pride. Perhaps the silver fingered Paul Holywood would be more to her liking.

I am not surprised. The phrase "the best thing since sliced bread" is an invention of an insane not a sage.

It has become almost impossible to buy a loaf upon which to wield one's bread saw (with a hacksaw-like blade) and I have long since changed to making my own, recently augmented with my Hibernian friend's soda bread. Her No.1 son, so he tells me from London exile, is making sour-dough bread - that may put us in competition in a field other than 'GO' (and MIG welding) but I have not tried that yet.

Perhaps bakers are true psychopaths - dictating the width of every slice of bread such that they come only in army sized widths. Too thin for toast and too thick for the cucumber sarnie.

Noah's, here, have invented another variant. Sliced, presumably when hot, but self congealed again when got to the galley. They must be sawn again but only down the pre-cut lines.

Where did the "H" come from?

A memslip (or do you usually economise on the one in hacksaw?).

No, can't say that I ever considered making my own bread saw.

Available for a few bob from hardware stores and even Argos.

Exactly, so why would I want to make my own?

Noa Bakery not Noah.
Whats all this oul guff about gully knives.

Bread so good you slice it twice.

You have been lucky. I find them rarer to buy than hens teeth and once, when not even one hentooth emporium did we have I spent an afternoon filing the blade to restore the gullet depth (by Prestige, we have had it as long as I can remember).

Since then I have found an almost proper line at M&S. To be secure I bought two. There are also some friends with minor bruises incurred when they tried to cut something other than bread with it.

I have no such hang-ups when it comes to bread boards although the one presently in use when there are guests is in the deep freeze. It caught furniture beetle from the paneling.

I have to admit that the traditional bread 'saw' with finely serrated teeth is nowadays almost impossible to find, and those that we still retain are incapable of resharpening once worn.
The current fashion is for a coarser serration or scalloped cutting edge, also much easier to resharpen.

Perhaps the conspiracy is with the cutlers. Stop producing bread saws that make cutting of loaf in any which way wanted easy, and joe public has no option but to buy the ready fashioned variety.

Why the technology here has resulted in sliced loaves that require cutting again is a complete mystery. Perhaps the re-slicing of it requires less sophisticated cutlery.

Our bread knife is also a Prestige and is at least 1000 years old. And cuts an acceptable slice. Modern knives with a scalloped edge have a habit of cutting a tapered slice which, when toasted, has a raw half and a burnt half. Soldiers look more like a Lowland Regiment than the Irish Guards.

Serrated bread knife....pah amateurs... real men use a hatchet, one swipe and voila a slice cut to your own specification. In Harland and Bluff we used a burners torch, sliced and toasted all in one.

Personally there is nothing better than a nice toasted heel, lashings of butter and hours of pleasure chewing on the crust.

If you two think the rest of us want you onboard wielding bread-slicing cleavers and inert gas toasting-torches you have got another one or two further thinks apiece coming up.

(You have a point when it comes to meat, however. Imagine HLMK Henry VIII doing away with his petticoat brigade with a ceremonial bread saw).