YP's flying Ryanair!!!

SS Ohio entering Valletta Harbour under tow with only a foot of freeboard and, for the island of Malta, a life saving cargo of fuel oil.  One of only five of the original fourteen merchant ships, but arguably the most important to make it.  We are outraged at the cost of fuel now.  The cost of the fuel on the tanker that saved Malta was, according to official reports:

 

1 Aircraft Carrier sunk (Eagle)

2 Light Cruisers sunk

1 Destroyer sunk

9 merchant ships sunk

1 aircraft carrier damaged

2 Light cruisers damaged

2 submarines sunk (interesting that submarines lost with all hands equate to less than a damaged light cruiser)

1 heavy cruiser damaged

1 light cruiser damaged (Again!  That's three light cruisers damaged and two sunk now isn't it? You can't sneak them by us one by one, the bean counters will notice in the end)

1 Submarine damaged

 

And what is not so well recorded, all those poor bastards who stood their posts and went down with them.

A few days ago Yorkshire Pudding posted that having endured a couple of months in Thailand before returning to England, he will once again abandon his beloved English shores.  And he accuses me of being an escapee expatriate.  He spends less time amongst the verdant hills of England than a swallow.

Of the 190 undisputed states and the 16 whose sovereignty is questionable comprising the world, YP with a passport the size of a  bench pressed volume of Encyclopedia Britannica still had a blank page begging an immigration stamp on page number 237. 

Now I realise, dear reader, that this just doesn't add up.  206 countries in the world, 16 of them disputed yet he has already reached page 237 in his no doubt cumbersome international personal identity document.  But bear in mind that YP is no spring chicken. He was present at the signing, and corrected the grammar of the Magna Carta.  Not only states but empires have risen and fallen during his tenure of the mortal coil.  So with the incomprehensible algorithmics available to all through Google and Trip Advisor, our YP realised he had missed one soverieign state, Malta.

Already on his death bed after an exhausting trip to Asia where he was massaged close to death, his only sustenance now his life depended on the NHS rather than almond eyed school girls being chunks of real Real Yorkshire Pudding dripping with gravy hand fed to him by genuinely chuncky northern lassies letting him lick their fingers and drip feeding him Tetley's beer, he raised a clenched fist in that iconinc anti-Thatcher salute and said, 'Book me a flight to Malta'.

'Malta?' said the nurse, a wee young trainee from the Philipines. 

'Mebbe he want drink make kid go sleep at night, Maltina', shrugged the Polish duty consultant signing off an extra cocktail of intravenous drugs.

Well, when you wake up, YP, this is what you have to look forward to flying Ryan Air courtesy of Tristan St James who has more Air Miles than all the NASA astronaughts combined.

 

Sorry there was no time for you to get the book about Operation Pedestal, but if you have the time in Malta, score a few photos of Valletta Harbour for me especially where the Ohio eventually settled on the putty.