I Am Out Early Today,

so straight on with today's post,

we decided to go out for a bit of a drive around and grab a bite to eat, so we decided on the small restaurant looking out to sea just past the new lighthouse, the drive took us through the speed boat parking area at the end of Walking Street and past the new marina under construction,

 it seems to be coming on quiet well,

 I guess the marina we normally use to go to the coral islands has become too small,

 the new light house on the left, the restaurant is justs a little past it around the bend in the road,

 the new marina on the right,

 and the walk way leading to it,

 we parked up in the car park,

 and made our way past one of the water features,

 to our table,

 the view looking back towards Pattaya,

and towards the coral islands,

an ice coffee for Diana,

 and one for myself,

 we ordered a few prawns,

 which looked and were delicious,

 although at 200 baht seemed a tad expensive since the last time we were here, but then it was such a nice view with a cooling breeze blowing past us,

 when we arrived home I took another picture of the flowers in the bromeliads, it seems a shame but each one seems to last just one day,

after our evenings meal we settled down for the nights viewing, starting with a few episodes from Private Schulz, basically the series is based on a true turn of events when Germany in the Second World War decided to print millions of pounds worth of fake notes, drop then from the air and destabilise the British economy,


in much the same way that The National Assembly that took de facto control of political power in France in the summer of 1789 and printed hundreds of millions of assignats, did, inflation became rampant until in stroke of genius as First Consul (1801), Napoleon introduced the 20 franc gold piece and insisted that from thenceforth soldiers, contractors, and merchants would be paid only in gold, or its equivalent, the paper blizzard was over,


but back to Private Schulz, 'Unternehmen Bernhard' and its predecessor 'Unternehmen Andreas' were secret German projects meant to destabilise the British economy by flooding the nation with counterfeit notes, from 1942 to 1945, the Germans forged more pound notes than all the reserves in the vaults of the Bank of England--132 million pounds, equal to about 15 per cent of all genuine notes in circulation and enough to cast suspicion on all of England 's paper money, at the end of the war the Bank of England was so embarrassed by the massive counterfeit that it not only burned the fakes but some of its files,


it could be said that like Gordon Brown's quantitative easing method that was designed to save our economy this was Hitler's attempt to scupper ours, some time ago a forged £20 note came to auction, Richard Westwood-Brookes, from Mullock's the auction house said: 'this was an audacious plot by the Nazis, they clearly believed that in addition to a physical attack on the UK they could also wreak havoc with the country's economy, it is however a supreme irony that where Hitler failed in this attempt, what happened last year with the quantitative easing seems to have amounted to exactly the same thing - flooding the economy with more and more paper money, where Hitler failed - let's hope that Gordon Brown's attempt won't have the same long term effects',


the series takes us through how all of this came about from how the operations leader Krueger, a textile engineer, figured out how to match the paper, printing, and design of the impressive British notes,


He found his forgers in Jewish death camps on the orders of SS Reichsfuehrer Heinrich Himmler, some were plucked from Auschwitz by Krueger himself, so far totally fascinating, more to follow over the next few days,

then the second disc from the box, Le château de Ma Mère (My Mother's Castle), another real treat from French cinema as we continue to follow the growing up of author Joseph Pagnol, a real delight to watch, we have both throughly enjoyed all 5 films that we have seen by this author and film director,

we finished the evening with a film A Beautiful Mind based on the life of Nobel prize winner John Forbes Nash it chronicles his decent into delusion and reality as both combine to lead him to his Nobel prize in reality and to shun his inner demons who daily haunt, goad and persecute him in his mind, a great performance by all concerned, with the end of the film in the early hours of the morning we were off to bed.