47 YEARS AGO TODAY.......

.......my life changed forever. Some weeks previously, I had received a summons to appear for a medical examination prior to being called up to do my 731 days National Service. The summons was, of course, issued in the name of our sovereign lady, HM The Queen and was accompanied by a postal order to the value of one shilling. By having it delivered to me, I was deemed to have taken the Queen`s shilling, so there was no going back.

The medical took place in a rather seedy hall above Burtons in Chatham High Street and, despite all my efforts, I was declared fit for purpose, to coin a current phrase. I then received instructions to report to the 4/7th Dragoon Guards training regiment at Catterick Camp in North Yorkshire.

Now, for someone who had seriously never been further north than, I think, Beccles in Suffolk, the prospect of making such a long journey into the unknown was both adventurous and daunting. Came the day, my farewells said to friends and family, I journeyed up to London, found my way across to Kings Cross station and got on a train that I was reliably informed would take me to Darlington, where I could catch a local connection to Catterick. All this to be achieved by 4.30pm, otherwise my military career would surely falter at the first hurdle.

It was a curious journey - I recall being genuinely surprised at just how big our country seemed to be - and the longer it went on, the more I realised that the security of all that I had known for almost 20 years was being replaced by uncertainty. As the train approached Darlington (at last) it seemed for some reason to go into reverse for a while, almost as if fate was smiling on me and I would be reversed back to Kings Cross and back to normality ....but no, just a shunting episode so we could be safely dumped on Darlington station platform.

The branch line to Richmond also headed south for a while. Surely, it couldn`t be....and it wasn`t. There, at Richmond station, a gaggle of 3-ton Bedford trucks awaited our arrival. We were invited to clamber in the back of the trucks and off we sped towards Catterick Camp and our arrival at Bourlon Lines, the barrack block, the parade ground, the clock tower, the Quartermaster Store, the barber shop, the cookhouse, from all of which there would be no escape for the next six weeks whilst we went through the rigours of `basic training.` But at least that would take care of 42 days, leaving me with only another 689 to do........

A day to remember indeed and each year when the anniversary comes around, I look back and smile with the knowledge that those experiences really did change my life forever - I, like everyone else who was `called up,` found the ability to stand on my own feet, to live alongside a diverse range of personalities, backgrounds, cultures, races and religions, but perhaps most telling of all, I discovered the ability to laugh at the futility of it all, the crass idiocy of the military mind but also the inexorable passage of time which even the most ardent military determination could not deny. Time is, as my profile says, the most precious commodity of all. Such a pity that it took me 731 days to discover it.