HMS Albion visiting HelsinkiI was lucky to hear at the seminar I attended last week that HMS Albion was doing a port visit last weekend, and having promised my better half that I would get the kids out of the house so she could study, it seemed like a fun thing to do. The Albion is BIG, it holds four landing craft inside, some of which at least can take a main battle tank, and you can land a Chinook on the back. There wasn't much kit inside currently, presumably most of the UK army's tanks are kinda busy these days and they don't have spares to send cruising the Baltic. They did have various diggers and bulldozers in the hold, and one very appreciative three-year-old looking on in wonderment described them as: "wow! it's like Soldier Bob the Builder!" Bob the Builder in camouflage is probably about as cool as it gets for three-year-old boys.
The fact that one of the Royal Navy's most modern and powerful assault ships is providing family entertainment in the Baltic rather than floating menacingly in the Straits of Hormuz says perhaps something optimistic about the incoming Brown government's foreign policy direction. If that's not signaling, I don't what is.
