Mrs P and I went for our daily walk recently. We went for a stroll through the pine forest at Ringwood. I know the forest very well, from a time long ago. I’ll tell you why. Late in the last millennium, I set my sights on a career in the RAF. I had completed the application and interview process and had been given a start date of 19th May 1999, at RAF Halton. There, I would complete basic training.
I was told that I should arrive in decent shape if I wanted to make it through to the end. What counts as ‘decent shape?’ One should be able to run a mile in under five minutes. That’s a pretty sharp pace. Early in the year I measured out a flat stretch of road and gave it a crack. I ran the mile in about eight and a half minutes, and the effort nearly killed me.
Over the next couple of months I got the time down to about six minutes and fifty seconds, but at that point any significant improvement stopped. And every effort nearly killed me. The problem, you see, is that I was more than a decade into a twenty a day smoking habit. On March 6th, I gave something new a go. I quit smoking. Cold turkey. And within a month I had cracked the five minute mile. And it didn’t kill me. It was easy.
In fact, I started running for fun. I’d rack up miles and miles on the soft sand and chalk tracks through the forest at Ringwood. Sometimes I’d venture off into the New Forest and run ten or fifteen miles there. But I mostly stuck to the local forest. I arrived at RAF Halton in the shape of my life, where I soon discovered that you really didn’t need to be able to run a mile in under five minutes. If that were true, few of the new recruits would ever have made it.
Had my career in the RAF ever actually taken off, then today would be quite the landmark. Today, I would have completed twenty two years service. That, generally speaking (and assuming I had not ventured into the officer ranks) is the point at which one bids the service a fond farewell.
Perhaps there’s a different universe out there, one in which I spent the ‘noughties’ not in Mexico, but in Afghanistan and Iraq. Perhaps that life worked out better. Perhaps it did not. I shan’t worry about it too much. The universe that I do occupy has generally served me well.
The Mexile 
Good! Reminds me of Robert Frost’s poem about the road not taken. And it reminds of them fork in my own road.
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My first year at university was devoted to learning to code and math, both were no fun. The coding was done on punch cards and well, math is math, not very exciting. At the time, industrial work paid better than head work. Head work had its perks, like staying clean and not getting crushed by the industrial process; the pay was double, even in the non union shops over what say, a teacher earned. We were just coming out of the Nam fandango, the military had zero attraction. I went to school whenever I was out of work for whatever reason, collected the evil unemployment to make ends meet. I finished a degree at age 38 but I was so far into my “30 years and out” at the steel mill , head work again looked a poor bargain if I wanted to quit work in my fifties.
I doubt I made as much money as I would have, had I stayed with the coding racket-water under the bridge. I have few regrets and none have to do with my choices about making my daily bread.
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I didn’t have a Vietnam to worry about. Arguably, there’s less to worry about when joining the military if your country is exiting a war. Perhaps one should be more concerned if one is joining a force that’s been enjoying a sustained period of peace. In 1999 the U.K. hadn’t had a proper shooting war for nearly 20 years. And Afghanistan and Iraq lay just round the corner.
To be fair, I signed up as an air traffic controller. I was hardly putting myself in the firing line.
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