Rick Brindle

  Yes, you could survive indefinitely off the land before or after the apocalypse. But if you haven’t got your food plot up and running already, there might be a few things you’ll want to do in pretty short order. Right, you’re a lone survivor. There might be other people around, but there won’t be many, so make the most of your ‘home alone’ time. Get as many veggie seeds planted as you can, then go to your nearest deserted supermarket, and pick up literally as many tins of food as you can carry. Once your veggies have grown, you’re good, but you’ll need some stopgaps until then, so maybe make a few trips to the deserted supermarket. Don’t worry, you want have to pay for anything. You can also do foraging tips into any nearby forests. If you’re lucky, an apple grower is, or was nearby. If you’re really lucky, a post apocalyptic potato farm will also be on your doorstep. Make your home as secure as possible. Sure, you’re on your own, but are you? And the animals will probably see yo...

  It's Not For Everyone , a personal memoir of my time in the RAF Regiment, is free to download from Amazon for a limited time. Get your free copy now! What do you do when your dream job turns into a nightmare? Rick Brindle was a third generation military child. His father and grandfather served their whole lives in the Army, and all he wanted to do was be a soldier. In 1989 he joined the RAF Regiment. But life in the Regiment was a world away from what he thought it would be, and it quickly became toxic. Facing a culture of bullying, beatings, verbal abuse and sexual harassment, the community he wanted to be a part of became more like a prison. Most people around him went along with the abuse. Some agreed with it, some joined in, while the chain of command routinely looked the other way. Set over thirty years ago, this is a story of surviving abuse that still resonates today. It’s Not For Everyone is essential reading for anyone considering a military career. Sometimes funny, some...

  I’ve had my EV for nearly a year, done one long journey, and it hasn’t bothered me a bit. I can get 160 to 220 miles on a full charge with my Renault Zoe. I’ve learned to use my home charger as my go-to, but if I go on a long trip, it’s all about using the technology, mainly zapmap and google maps, to figure out where the public chargers are, and visiting as many as I need to in order to get me where I need to be. For myself, I avoid the motorway service stations, and instead look for retail parks with a bank of EV charge points as my pit stops, for two reasons. There’s a lot more to see and do than there is at Fleet or South Mims, and the charge is loads cheaper as well. You’re talking about 79p per kW at the motorway over 49p per kW at the retail park. Well worth a small diversion. It’s just a case of knowing your car’s limits and staying within them. Sister Alex   It's Not For Everyone Cold Steel on the Rocks We Are Cold Steel Cold Steel and the Underground Boneyard

  Cold Steel and the Underground Boneyard , the third book in the Cold Steel trilogy, is free to download for a limited time. Get your free copy now! Cold Steel are back! Their new album has just been released. Their previously cancelled Spanish tour dates have been rearranged, with the female trio and Spain’s biggest metal band, Damas Infernales, supporting. Cold Steel’s biggest asset though, is Johnny Faslane, their brutally talented manager. But even Johnny can’t fully eliminate Cold Steel’s innate ability to spectacularly destroy their prospects, and even before their second concert ends, the tour is scrapped after an ill-advised trip back to the eighties, and the band are put into creative deep freeze by their record company. Only an unprecedented event and a lot of money can possibly turn their fortunes around. Like a five hundred year old treasure hoard that a long dead pirate once offered in return for his life, treasure that has never been found. Cold Steel find a ...

The Selous Scouts, now there was a top drawer miliary unit, and well worth a recap on what they were all about. As the picture shows, it was a multi-racial unit with black and white soldiers serving and fighting alongside each other, and promotion was based entirely on merit, not colour. If the rest of Rhodesia had been a bit more like that, it could have been a different story, but that’s a bit off-topic for this question. Anyway, the Selous Scouts’ official role was to track the insurgents and bring the Fireforce units in to eliminate them. The selection course was brutal At one point of the training, a dead monkey was dropped off at the recruits’ camp, and the choice was this: cook it right and you’ve got a meal, cook it wrong and you’ll get botulism. And as much as tracking was their ‘cover’ role, they did actually do that, and they did it exceptionally well. They also did ‘pseudo-ops.’ That involved them pretending to be insurgents, gaining their confidence, and either luring whol...

  I bought Seventh Star in 1986, and I thought it was amazing. At the time, I was just getting into metal, and really, I didn’t know jack about the history. I knew that Ozzy was a thing, but I didn’t know he’d been Sabbath’s first singer. I was also liking Dio’s second album, The Last in Line, but again, had no idea at the time that he’d been in Sabbath, either. All I knew was the music, and if I liked it, I listened to it. I also loved listening to Rainbow’s Finyl Vinyl. And all of that added up in my mind to one thing: I really didn’t care  who  was in the band, just as long as they played music I liked, I was happy. On that, I’ve never changed. I didn’t really know much about Glenn Hughes, didn’t pay much heed to him being fired by Black Sabbath, and by the time that Eternal Idol came along, I’d also bought, listened to and loved the Dio era Sabbath albums. By then, I knew the history with Ozzy, but it wasn’t until the 2000s that I bought the albums from that era. It’s...

Not really. If anything, it’s made the debate pretty toxic, and intentionally or not, it’s thrown trans people under a bus. Basically, if you were born with a nunu, you can call yourself a woman, and the law will see you as a woman. If you’re born with a willy, you’re a man. And that’s it, black and white. Okay, that’s pretty clear and unequivocal. However, for the best guess absolutely maximum 262,000 trans people in the UK, half of one per cent of the population, that’s a bit of a problem. Let’s just repeat that, an absolute maximum of half of one per cent of the UK population. It’s worth saying that even the Office of National Statistics thinks that might be an over estimate. Talk about using a sledgehammer to crack a nut. Because as clear as it may be for the vast majority of people, for the trans community, it just isn’t that clear. Imagine being born male or female and simply not identifying with that gender. For trans people, that is their life, and it is very real. Anyway, zoom...