25th October

All right, this is the one you've all been waiting for. Balaclava Day, 1854. When 678 men of Lord Cardigan's Light Brigade (most of whom are sitting in 54mm replica in my attic) rode into the Valley of Death and into legend after a confused order took them the wrong way.

'It was a mad-brained trick, men,' Cardigan said to the survivors afterwards, 'but it was no fault of mine.'

'Go again, sir?' an anonymous soldier asked him. Makes you proud to be British, doesn't it?

In other news ...
It was a good day for a battle today - Agincourt was fought in 1415 in the mud of Northern France. The French nobility were all but wiped out by a much smaller force, largely of archers, under Henry V. A while ago there was a move to have October 21 (Trafalgar Day) or October 25 (Agincourt Day) declared a public holiday in Britain, but that was shelved in case it upset our French colleagues in the EU. Actually, on the basis of that there ought to be no public holidays because I can't think of a day when we didn't knock seven bells out of them.

5th March

The most brilliant fighter plane of all time, the Spitfire, soared over the skies of Britain today in 1936. built by Vickers with a Rolls Royce Merlin engine, the plane was to prove more than a match for the Messerschmidt 109 which Willi of the same name had already brought out in Germany. I remember seeing an advert (which was never shown for fear of upsetting our dearest partners in the EU - how soon they forget) showing a Spitfire doing a victory roll over the White Cliffs of Dover and the voiceover saying 'Because he was there, we don't have to say "Vorsprung durch technik".'

Thank you, RJ Mitchell and all the men (and women) who flew them.

In other news ...
Eighty two years ago, Clarence Birdseye came out with his frozen peas. They were round and green and tasted just like the real thing, only colder. Clarence was a New York food scientist and joined the ranks of other cryo-culinarists such as Alvin Findus and Mervyn McCain to bring us such delights as the 20 second sausage and the 5 second baked potato. To steal a thought from Homer Simpson, reading the back of a ready meal - 5 seconds! How can anybody wait that long?