At the weekend the serene, beautiful one was being nosey and for some unknown reason was looking through my wardrobe. I think that she may have been looking to get through to Narnia, although she is constantly muttering about how many designer shirts/shoes/sweaters/suits/trousers I have. I mean she once actually counted the number of shirts that I have hanging there. It’s not right; a bloke must have some privacy, and shirts.
Anyway I am digressing from my tale; she emerged holding up a large pair of binoculars and asked if I knew they were at the bottom of the wardrobe. I grabbed them and lied “Of course I did”.
I examined the said binoculars that I had thought lost years ago and the memories flooded back. The binoculars are huge, heavy and rubber armoured. During my naval service I was taking part in evolutions in 1954/55 as part of Arctic Warfare training and we had docked in Tromso in Norway. I saw these really cool WW2 German binoculars in a shop window in the town. It wasn’t a second hand shop just a shop selling a few tins of food and other odds and ends. I went in and haggled and bought the said binocular for about £5.00.
At that time there were salvage companies scrapping the German Bismarck Class Battleship Tirpitz which was lying in the nearby fjord, courtesy of a couple of British Mini Subs and a couple of Tallboy bombs dropped from a British Lancaster Bomber. I thought that they may have been liberated from the wreck but that may have been wishful thinking.
They are marked Hensoldt Wetzlar Nacht Dialyt 8×56 and brought back memories of “Das Boot” and the like. As I said they looked really cool in Grandson speak. So nearly sixty years later I searched on the internet and found that the Hensoldt Company in Wetzlar, Germany was taken over by Carl Zeiss and they are quite a sought after bit of kit. On eBay there is a similar pair in Poland at a buy now price of £700 plus postage.
I think that my lady wife might have discovered Narnia unless it’s all a daydream.
My Lord it is a real pain putting things on eBay to sell them, lots of photos and even lots more flim-flam just to post an item for sale. However on day one I have 6 watchers and 47 people have looked at them. Das ist ja gut?
