On
e of this week’s fortunate happenings was to be invited to a cocktail party and beating retreat at the Wattisham Flying Station. The last time I was mixing with operational military air crew was in Salalah in 1982. That of course was a different world. The young officers today have done their tours of Afghanistan and finished their Top Gun Training in the U.S. The Army reckons that it costs about £3.5 million to train Apache Helicopter pilots. You get a sense of what a machine the Apache is when it weighs over nine tons fully loaded and can be thrown around the sky at 180 m.p.h. Not that any throwing around is done. These machines cost around £35 million each. The cocktail party was fortunate insofar as Suffolk County Council are initiating a Community Covenant With The Armed Forces. On first reading the Covenant strikes one as being a tad flabby. It is apparently meant as first steps and obviously it cannot be a one size fits all as the various units and communities have different needs. I was in total awe of the personnel whom we met. They are very professional and certainly good value for money. They do deserve our support and one of my ambitions is to make it easier for our veterans to settle in communities of their choice – or as one veteran once put it to me “I can’t go back to where I enlisted. If I become homeless in Camden my wife will divorce me”. We need to work out better ways to support our military.
Month: September 2012
Wind Turbine
I publish a monthly column in the Hadleigh Community News called Out of the Frying Pan. The point of the column is to highlight and comment on what is happening in Babergh from the point of our town. The aim is to be informative and occasionally entertaining. Hopefully I focus on some of the issues creeping under the radar. In July I wrote of a proposal for a 18 metre (59 feet) wind turbine off the Pond Hall Road. The 18 metres was from the ground to the top of the turbine and did not include the total height of the turbine blades. By contrast the only turbine in Hadleigh is only 9 metres high. The flag pole outside Babergh’s Corks Lane offices is 6 metres high. Although the site is in pasture, the turbine would be visible from the Pond Hall Road (400 metres/433 yards away) and would be extremely visible from the proposed housing area being planned for the land south of Tower Mill Lane and east of Frog Hall Lane. This week’s good news is that the planning application has been withdrawn. So a small triumph for common sense. Forward with the people
The Artist
At the weekend we took ourselves off to Leavenheath where the village hall was screening The Artist. The hall is part of the Suffolk Digital Cinema Network (a non-profit association) which encourages community film screenings across Suffolk. Network members borrow digital projection equipment, and get advice and training on how to run properly-licensed screenings in their own venues. Members choose the films they show to meet the needs of their local audiences. There were just under fifty people in the audience and it all went very well. There was a interval during which we could buy drinks and ice creams. I fully recommend The Artist which is a 2011 French romantic comedy-drama film in the style of a black-and-white silent film and stars Jean Dujardin and Bérénice Bejo. The story takes place in Hollywood, between 1927 and 1932, and focuses on the relationship of an older silent film star and a rising young actress as silent cinema falls out of fashion and is replaced by the “talkies”. (A sort of Singing in the Rain without the wetness). Some might argue that the real star of the film is Uggie, Dujardin’s Jack Russell .
Sound finally comes in as the film starts rolling for a dance scene with Dujardin and Bejo. Once the choreography is complete, the two dancers are heard panting, and this is only time in the film sound is heard coming from Bejo, who otherwise says nothing. The director of the musical calls out audibly, “Cut!” to which producer adds: “Perfect. Beautiful. Could you give me one more?” Dujardin, in his only audible line, replies “With pleasure!” revealing his strong French accent. The camera then pulls back to the sounds of the film crew as they prepare to shoot another take.
Well worth a trip to one of the villages and well worth seeing the film again
brian riley's blog 