Can you explain to us, to me, and maybe some of our audience, what are you doing at a hound trial? What are you looking for? And as a huntsman, what's your job there?

So there are basically two phases of evaluating.

One of which is a hound show, which is a beauty contest.

Basically, you're looking at confirmation.

You're looking at movement.

and you obviously can't tell anything about nose or voice, maybe a little bit about voice, spitability, things like that, that you need to know from a hunting standpoint.

But when you're judging at hound shows, you're looking at conformation, and the idea being that just like with a horse, good conformation is going to allow that animal to hold up and last longer than a hound with poor conformation.

Well, the last

So when did it really hit you that it was no longer training and it was war? Was there any particular episode?

Look, one that comes to mind was having transferred to the Alacrity, we were working with that ship and we then had William McCracken's team brought on board to be inserted onto East Island.

William McCracken and his team of four guys.

So at this point, we're on the Alacrity and again, nothing's happened.

There's been no bangs, nobody's shot at us.

There's been no aircraft attackings, anything like that.

So it's still relatively quiet.

And how did the selection and training for the OP troop compare to the training and selection you did to get

Yeah.

Um, and then when you start thinking about the CW, the length of the CW, the, the number of bits in it, um, then to...

in order to get a level playing field, you've gotta start taking some of the complicated ones out.

So we knew that four, um, four groups really wasn't gonna be enough, which is how we ended up with seven.

So, but I have to say, the conversation with Ofcom, they sort of reply...

I told them what we wanted.

They said, "You want what now?" [laughs]

Yeah

That Cardiff Bay has hoarded power that it should have been devolving to Welsh local government.

Yeah.

I mean, uh, I- if I was a chief executive in local government and a leader in Welsh local government, I'd, I'd, I, I hear what Laura's saying, but I would read that speech and sort of say, "Well, you know, get the Beaujolais out," because, you know, for a lo- from a local government point of view, probably the most pro, pro-council speech a prime minister or forthcoming prime minister's ever made.

I mean, th- there's, there's differences here between the two sets of devolution, isn't there? What, what you see in the Lees, you know, the Richard Lees-Bernstein Manchester model is a very specific model.

Uh, it's municipal Labour politics fused very much with private sector regeneration.

You know, Burnham has talked about business-friendly socialism and, you know, it's the city leadership going back over twenty years now saying we'll use markets, developers, universities, airports, transport scheme, land values, and most importantly, white door relationships to rebuild the city region.

Let's remember that George Osborne was all over this like a rash.

You know, how much of this was actually dependent on the personalities and skills and chemistry of the chief executive of the council and the leader of the council for all those years?

Yeah.

And so we started putting together a list of our families, and we didn't really know much, so we s- reached out to our extended family, like my brothers and our aunts and uncles and fathers, and we say, "Who all do you know that are in the military that we can recognize?" And that list grew into the list that you see up here behind me, back over here, [laughs] wherever that is.

Over there.

What was y- was your dad serving, too?

[coughs] So, my father was in the Army.

[clears throat] And his brother, our Uncle Garland, he wa- uh, he went first, enlisted.

They were both in the National Guard, and then Garland went active duty first.

And then my father was supposed to go 30 days later, but because he was killed, Garland, um, I'm not sure if it was a choice my father made or a choice the military made not to send him.