2009 was an eventful year for me, especially as twelve months ago I predicted virtually none of it. This time last year I was on Swansea Bay trying to kiteboard on flat tyres, with a last minute decision to visit Cardiff on the way home, a very nice city I’d be happy to return to one day, but I returned home with no plans for the rest of the year.
February brought the first snow in Manchester in the eighteen months I’d been there, dispelling the myth for sure that it only ever rains here. That said, by the next day, rain had come and washed the snow away. I was also greeted by two new house mates, both French, and both a little mad in their own way, hence I got on with them quite well. On the first weekend out together I managed to bruise, possibly fracture, my coccyx following a fall from the boot of Mike’s car, a week before a fitness test with the OTC, which also happened to be the first weekend with the OTC where we used live ammunition, and I instantly fell in love with the sight of tracers zipping across inches above the floor at several times the speed of sound before ricochetting upwards into the sky.
Super8 & Tab and Above & Beyond came to Birmingham in March celebrating the release of the AnjunaDeep album. Overjoyed by this, I bought my tickets before realising I had two exams the next morning, but just for the record, they went OK. Just.
March came with Exercise Gold Lion, our most gruelling OTC weekend ever, in which we completed MLDP-1. It was also a bank holiday weekend, meaning full 3 nights of no sleep in the freezing cold. During just one of the days we witnessed every weather known to man; warm sunshine and freezing snow less than an hour apart, with a thunderstorm in between. By day we swam through tunnels, and by night we dried off. We snuck through the darkness to discover where the enemy weren’t and made our first ever dawn attack.
However, April rewarded us with the best fun the OTC had given us (after giving me concussion from of a kiting accident on Brancaster Bay), ever. MOD-3 Enemy. Manchester and Liverpool OCdts and some TA were having their final assessment before heading off to Sandhurst, and hence needed someone to shot at, or more importantly, shoot back at them. Cue myself and five band of brothers (sister included), two M249’s (light machine guns, which we were given with no training whatsoever), six LA85-A2’s, flares and grenades, and more ammunition than you could fit in several articulated lorries. The lorries could have come in handy, I was literally pinned to the floor trying to carry the stuff on my back. Ezra managed to lose all the skin from his finger which he left in front of the case ejection port. I managed to make the same mistake except I was wearing gloves. It felt like someone was hitting my finger with a hammer at 750RPM for the next few days, but given it remained intact, I had the “Minimi” for the remainder of the week, running around like Rambo ten miles south of Hadrian’s Wall. In between the 30-round bursts, I fired off my BFA, twice, into the enemy, both times making a satisfying pop followed by a search for a small yellow rod, which I found twenty minutes later in a puddle still steaming and too hot to pick up. We also witnessed numerous artillery and mortar strikes, and best of all, got paid for the whole experience.
June saw my decision to go to Japan, so I slaved away during my exam period to put together an itinerary. My housemates refused to believe how much preparation I’d done, but I’d literally planned what platform to be on, at what station and at what time, with a different hotel for each night, for 21 days. After seeing my plan, a coursemate, Herman, decided to join in on the fun. Flight costed £450, train tickets costed £450, accommodation and international driving permit came to another £100. I’d just spent a grand on a country I hadn’t even turned up at the airport for yet.
Then came even more action from the OTC, in the form of Summer Camp. In essence it was a week of team blister building, though I still never managed to grow a single one, followed by a week of flying around Devon in helicopters before being devoured by midges on a final exercise involving a 5-hour hike in the pitch black to do a dawn attack which went horribly wrong. In the following few nights, I experienced the most peculiar thing, I’d even go as far as to say, I’ve experienced Gulf War Syndrome. Despite now being back at home, or in some cases, at a mates house, I’d frequently wake up in the middle of the night, convinced I was under attack and would start a frenzied search for my rifle. I would like to believe the mortar attacks are what caused this, but I think it was more down to the midnight pranks going on in the barracks.
And then July came. The plan was to run around Japan for twenty-one days and then make it to France in time for the Fête de Bayonne. We travelled the four main islands in a figure-of-8, basically trying to dash through every festival that was happening in the country. We watched men run through a forest while trying not to set themselves on fire, watched men pull 6-story carts through the streets of Kyoto without electrocuting themselves, visited both atomic bomb sites, rented a car for the day, with drive-by projectile vomiting, watched the Solar Eclipse, found an eight foot long penis and went back in time to watch the samurai version of the Grand National. We got overshadowed by a life-sized Gundam model and a 20 foot robotic spider, witnessed legalised street racing in Yokohama, and climbed Fuji over a pitch-black night, and climbed back down during a foggy sunrise. In other words, we never actually saw the mountain we climbed.
And then… we missed the flight home. With an expired rail pass, this meant a three day relax in Osaka before the next affordable flight, but also meaning I wouldn’t get to join my dad and sister in Bayonne for the festival which I look forward to every year.
The debt which accumulated from having to buy last minute plane tickets didn’t ruin summer though, for the OTC had more fun to offer. I was to be paid to go to Bavaria for a ten days, rock climbing, canoeing and hiking. Frankly the hiking didn’t compare, and indeed, the highest point we scaled was lower in altitude than the point we started climbing Fuji, I couldn’t help but think “Pfft, amateurs” whenever someone struggled or commented on the danger of the situation, but it was still a lot of fun.
September was the month of bad news. Back to uni. Found a place to live, and my bike got stolen on the first weekend I moved in. Also during our first weekend back “on the job”, the MOD announced that the Territorial Army was being effectively disbanded. It turned out the OTC would keep going, but we’re no longer being paid for what we do. As people dropped out to get real jobs, the numbers decreased dramatically, and I can’t help but worry for the future of Britain’s defences. Furthermore, the internet in my house was really dodgy; my new job as “MSUOTC webmaster” now felt like the worst chore ever, in more ways than one.
I joined the hiking club, and in October, we climbed Snowdon. At a quarter the height of Fuji, I couldn’t help but feel disappointed, but met an awesome group of people nonetheless. In following weeks we also went to the lake district where we created a tsunami in a cave, and then went on the fail the Yorkshire 3-Peaks in November. Remembrance Sunday was an epic failure. The American priest ranted about Muslims and then gave us 5 separate 2 minutes silences because he kept finishing his speech too early, then thinking of something to add. Despite the changing weather, I was always glad to be out of the house. The internet kept dying and so did the gas. My landlord refused to acknowledge the problem, so I hacked the router myself, thus becoming king on the internet times two. The gas I couldn’t do anything about, and eventually my whole house died of cold, and I found a new place to live.
December came and dumped awesome levels of snow, literally out of no where. I went home from my last exam of the year in sunshine, and went out to a party a few hours later sliding all over the pavement. Voluntarily. I thought I was being immature, until I looked around and realised everyone, even up into the middle-ages, was doing exactly the same. While driving my uncle around various airports trying to find one that was open, I watched a bus slide sideways down a hill. It was all very exciting. An annual Van Buuren bash in Brum, was the event for Xmas, while new years eve saw me up in my room working.
All in all it’s been a very good year. My new years resolutions normally happen around September, when I go back to uni, renew my social life and activities, and get back to work after a long summer of leisure. However, this being my final year of uni, for the first year every, I need to start thinking about the future, thus, surprise surprise, I do actually have some plans this time around.
Tomorrow I’m off skiing. And then I’m going to finish MSUOTC.co.uk v1.1, and then make my Lego robot autonomous. I then plan on completing MOD 2 and 3 and will then get straight firsts in my final exams. If my interviews go well, I’ll be going to Japan in July as an English teaching assistant. Maybe before then I’ll be able to visit my dad in Venezuela.