 | Home > Off Topic > Hong Kong's Saracen on patrol in small-town England |
 
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| Supacat Member Since: 16 Oct 2012 Location: West Yorkshire Posts: 11018   
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One for Pickles
"It was in the unlikely setting of a notorious road junction in southwest England called the Magic Roundabout that 9.5 tonnes of Hong Kong history came to the bemused attention of the police one Friday night. The astonishment of the officers in Swindon was understandable. After all, it isn't every day that a hulking blue armoured car, "armed" and with Chinese markings, brings two lanes of a busy intersection to a standstill. On board the marooned vehicle were a party of teenage girls on their way to a school prom and the somewhat flustered owner of the Saracen Mark II armoured car, surgeon Phill Burgess, who had bought it months earlier. "The girls on board were the daughters of people who drink in The Plough," 62-year-old Burgess explains, referring to his local pub, behind which he keeps his Saracen. "We broke down 10 yards from where we were supposed to take them. When we broke down I rang the wife and said, 'Guess what? We've broken down on the Magic Roundabout.' And what must be a familiar story to some on here: "With a six-cylinder, eight-litre Rolls-Royce engine that does about 10km to the gallon, Burgess - whose other car is a Land Rover - admits the 11-seater Saracen is not the most practical of vehicles and he had to overcome the objections of his wife and two daughters to get his hands on one. "I had been trying to persuade my wife for years that I should be allowed to buy some sort of military vehicle," he says. "She kept saying to me, 'If you want to buy this toy then what you have got to do is give me the same value in money and the running costs.'" http://www.scmp.com/magazines/post-magazin...small-town |
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25th Jan 2016 9:37am |
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