I misheard something on TV as this yesterday and I thought it sounded like some cold-war thriller. The Oerlikon is of course a lot older than the cold war having its roots in WW1. I always thought it was Scandinavian but after a bit of trawling it is clear that I was thinking of the Bofors gun, the Oerlikon being Swiss and was manufactured under licence in Britain after the designs were smuggled out of Zurich around the time of the fall of France in WWII. Both the Oerlikon and the Bofors guns are autocannons meaning that they are self-loading cannons with a calibre more than standard small-arms but less than conventional artillery. I will now be trying to find a subject for a poem with the title of The Oerlikon Solution having already written one called The Bofors Gun some years ago. I'm not actually sure what an Oerlikon could be the solution for, save perhaps for being attacked by a propeller-driven aircraft which despite the stories we have been seeing recently about the amount of gun-crime in the inner cities is not likely to be the over-reaction to an accidental glance at someone's "bird" anytime soon. You never know though. "Leave it Douglas - he's not worth it." I suppose it would be nice to have one in the garden even if it was deactivated.

There was an anti-aircraft gun in the the car-park of Worcester swimming pool in the seventies and amazingly all the mechanics to move the carriage and the barrel were still working so after swimming you could sit on it and target any planes which flew over. I have always wondered whether the actual firing mechanism was still working and that the authorities were just relying on the lack of 20mm ammunition to avoid nasty accidents. Anyway, it vanished sometime in the early eighties - possibly after some small boy actually found some spare 20mm ammunition. This has reminded me that we actually found one piece of 20mm ammunition on a shelf at the back of the garage. I think it might have been empty but you never know. Not sure what happened to it. A mate of mine had the compass from a Lancaster bomber which I desperately wanted. All we had from the war was a stirrup pump which gave us hours of fun. And The Aphex Twin has a tank - it's just not fair!