Rick Brindle

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...

We Are Cold Steel,  the second novel in the Cold Steel trilogy is free to download on Amazon for a limited time. Hurry, get your free copy now. A day after their historic concert on the Caribbean island of St Clements, heavy metal band Cold Steel are heroes. Now, all they have to do is stay out of trouble and enjoy a well-earned holiday until they start work on their next album. Except that the owner of the recording studio hates all things Cold Steel. Except that Cold Steel’s record company has blackmailed the studio into accepting them. Except that not all reporters are as friendly as band manager Johnny Faslane’s girlfriend, Rachel Shaw. With a tight deadline, Cold Steel have to get the next album out before their tour starts. They can’t afford any delays, and Johnny has his work cut out keeping the band in line. Feral former soldiers, reporters with an agenda, cake-obsessed studio execs and international criminals all work their way into the mix as the band hurtle from one impr...

  They’re here to stay, and they are the future. I’ve had my Renault Zoe for about 8 months now, and there’s no way I’d ever go back to petrol, or even a hybrid. Admittedly, not everyone can, bit if you can fit a home charger, then running costs are insanely cheap. I’ve never paid more than three quid for an overnight charge, and seven for a day time charge. and sure, charging points cost more, but it’s still way less than petrol, and lot less volatile, both in price and global safety. Retail parks are an ideal fallback position. Plug in, do your shopping , get a bite to eat, and come back to a fully charged motor. Thanks to a legion of apps, you can find charging points right across the country, so if you’ve got a long journey to make, all you need to do is plan your pitstops. I’d still advise retail parks over motorway stops, cheaper to charge, better facilities, more reliable, in my experience. And of course there’s the eco thing. You’re not polluting the atmosphere, you’re not ...

  Cold Steel on the Rocks,  the first novel in the Cold Steel trilogy is free to download from Amazon for a short time. Get your free copy now!  When the pirate, Blackbeard, buried his treasure, he could never have imagined that it would fall to the heavy metal band, Cold Steel, to come looking for it. Cold Steel, high-octane British rockers who came close to legendary status, until the release of their fourth album, when their excesses send them spiralling into terminal decline. Struggling small-time band manager Johnny Faslane, in the right place at the right time, lands the dream job of managing Cold Steel, and then has the seemingly impossible mission of turning the band around. Cold Steel’s singer, Maxwell Diabolo, claims to have a treasure map that he thinks will lead him to Blackbeard’s lost riches. With the band bent on a terrifying path of self-destruction, Johnny wonders if they will even complete the tour, much less get to the Caribbean to embark on a treasure ...

I joined the RAF Regiment in 1989, and back then, the answer was a resounding yes. Bad treatment of recruits was always in the news, and there were always anecdotal stories about how back in the day, Basics was really hard, how all sorts of bad stuff happened to recruits, and how the current crop were wimps and that standards had dropped, largely because it was suddenly against the regs to beat up recruits. It’s a thing in Russia, no shocks there. I remember one of my Corporals saying that he regularly got twatted by his instructors when he went through Basics. Whether it ever happened in the British military, I have no idea, but in 1989 it most certainly didn’t. Sure, there were isolated incidents. Always have been, always will be, but they were very much unofficial, and usually (and quite rightly so), career ending for the perpetrator. Kicked out of the army for forcing recruits to strip naked and box each other. Basics was very closely monitored, and so it was always the safest plac...