pumpkinstrokemarrow

Then, a bit further down the road we come to the King's Arms, last noticed on 16th October (search continuing to behave itself). Maybe twenty vans in the car park which have been there maybe 20 working days. If we allow £250 a day for each van plus an allowance of £100 for materials we get to £140,000, say £150,000 in round numbers including some of the VAT. Can't really expect builders to pay the full whack. Which is rather less than I had originally guessed. Must ask the TB'ers what a proper allowance for an average van would be. But even so, supposing the King's Arms is to sell things at £10 a pop at 50% operating margin, they have to sell 30,000 of them to get their capital back, never mind the interest. Let's say that for this to be a proposition they need to get their capital back in two years of 300 working days each, then they need to do 50 items a day. Which does not sound too difficult. Perhaps I shall pop in to see how they get on. Be interesting to see their business model and then to see their outturn. Perhaps I should have been a banker not a concrete engineer.

But the Royal Navy does things on a much grander scale. The DT tells me that they are about to take delivery of a spiffing new submarine, called an attack submarine, so presumably not the sort which carries hundreds of nuclear warheads, coming in at something between £1 and £2b. And we are to buy half a dozen or more of the things. What on earth are these things for? To hunt down the odd Afghani battleship which manages to break our blockade?

The Somali pirates must be well chuffed (see 10th February). Every billion pounds poured down the submarine hole is a billion pounds less to spend on the sort of kit which might sort them out. My latest idea on this front is an exclusion zone. No traffic whatsoever in a band between 20 and 100 miles off the coast. Fishermen will have to stick to crab potting or whatever they can manage inshore. Anything unexpected in the exclusion zone is sunk without warning. Might think about picking up survivors during office hours. The coastline in question looks to be about 1,000 miles long, so one of those fast patrol boats we used to have in the sixties every 20 miles or so, plus some fancy radar ought to do the trick. Maybe chuck in a few aeroplanes or helicopters to vary the diet. I would have thought that £250,000 a pop ought to be enough for a suitable patrol boat, given that one only needs a largeish, fast cabin cruiser with a big machine gun on the front. So for the price of a spiffing new submarine you could have 4,000 of them. Ought to be more than enough to cover 1,000 miles of coastline. Even be able to have some in dock some of the time. The Russians used to be sensible about this sort of thing: lots of cheap and cheerful can sometimes pack more punch than a few fancies. Perhaps I should write to the DT on the subject.

PS I have a soft spot for the King's Arms in its guise as a boozer, as the place I learnt to play spoof. Some of the public bar crowd there used to play for serious stakes. A good deal more serious - say £100 or more - than I cared to play for. Which all goes to show that the propensity to gamble is poorly related to the ability to pay for it.