June: Annapurna Circuit, Nepal vs Summer Camp, Scotland

At face value, Nepal seems the easy winner, but in my situation, it’s not so simple. The Annapurna Circuit is a 23-day mountain trail which I discovered when a Canadian traveller I met in Japan showed me photos of his global adventure. I instantly set the trail as a life goal to complete before I die, perhaps on the way back from Japan, assuming I get the job and take it on. Then I made friends with some people at university who told me they were doing it this summer, I showed an interest and was invited. Obviously I’d rather go on the trek with a group of friends (all of whom I get on very well with) than to go by myself in a few years time. It would also probably be the last time I ever see friends from Manchester ever again, as I don’t have much intention of returning to Manchester once I graduate, and I doubt they do either. The situation on their side is there’s a couple going and two more girls. The guy doesn’t want to be the only guy going, while his girlfriend and two other girls also don’t want him to be the only guy going, so they’re pretty hopeful that I go.

The cost include: £450-£650 flight (They seem to have booked the most expensive option. They also seem to have chosen the worst possible time of year to go. Dusty dry season followed by monsoon half way), £2 per night accommodation, plus food and sight seeing in Kathmandu/India should I chose to hang around with the two girls after. The dates they have planned are May 25th to June 29th (landing in UK on 30th). One thing I mustn’t forget is costs of equipment, though specialist equipment isn’t really necessary.

On the other hand, Summer Camp might be the last thing I ever do with the military, and the last chance I ever have to enjoy time with friends from the OTC. There’s a slim chance the OTC will receive funding again by this time, hence I might get paid the usual ~£600 to attend. On the other hand, the OTC may get funding cut entirely, meaning summer camp wont happen, which makes my decision easy.. in the sense that it’s made up for me. Summer Camps tend to be hit and miss, and I’d say last years felt about average. It was very poorly planned, but we still flew around the south west in helicopters, went on the firing ranges (though with just LA85A2s, last year they had pistols and GPMGs and all sorts), and did some pretty fun exercises and learnt a lot of cool stuff. I came back with symptoms of Gulf War Syndrome which was a lingering reminder of how awesome the time was, and the ~£600 came in handy for Japan. This year, will it be better planned? Will we have more weapons to try out on the ranges? It’s in Scotland, will the weather be crap? Will we get paid? What more can it have to offer? I’ve pretty much done everything the army can offer without me joining a TA or regular unit.

Cost: nothing, except 2 weeks in mid-June.

July: Commence 2 years in Japan vs .. well, it all gets a bit messy

I’ve had the interview for a job assisting in teaching English in Japan, probably for two years, as that’s what most people seem to do. In April I find out if I was successful, in May I find out which lonely, isolated fishing village I’m stationed in. The Japanese government will pay for the flights and visa, and I’ll be paid approx. £20k/yr with silly amounts of holiday time.

My larger life-goal has always been to be a pilot in the military, the most probable option now being in the Army Air Corps given the bulk of my military training has been with the OTC (sort of part of the army). Since Iraq and Afghanistan went tits up, I’ve been putting it off, waiting for a more justifiable war to come our way before I go around, simply put, killing people, or aiding in the art of. Besides this prospect, the military offers everything I could possibly ask for from life, the training, the social, the adventure and the qualifications I can pick up to resume an adventurous lifestyle outside of the military. After putting it off for all this time, I suddenly feel a sense of urgency. The AAC accepts pilots up to 29 yrs old, so I still have seven years on that front. The real issue is that right now I’m probably in my prime. Sure I can get fitter, but this doesn’t stop the issue of eyesight getting worse with age. My optician told me I have the most perfect eyesight he’s ever come across, and that I’ll never need glasses, but I know of people who have been told the same thing by their opticians who now rely on lenses. The other reason to do it now is the AAC only recruits from the top quarter of Sandhurst graduates. To be fair, I’ve just been tagging along for the ride, and not taken the training as seriously as other people in the OTC. In the time away from the country and out of training, I’ll have probably forgotten everything I’ve learnt, putting me at a massive disadvantage.

So I chose between joining now, meaning high probability of being sent to Afghanistan and having to put off Japan for a few years (or maybe lose interest in Japan by then), or go to Japan, hope my eyesight’s still perfect (or the army’s stopped caring about eyesight), and then be sent to what will probably be an unjustified war in Iran, just as it’s kicking off and when most of the dirty work is done. I’d much rather Ireland or Argentina kicked off again, at least we’d be the defenders and my work would be more justified, or perhaps another biblical great flood, meaning my skills would be used to rescue people.. .

I’m in the process of booking a medical and aptitude test with the AAC, I might find out early that I don’t have what it takes. If I do pass, I can get half the application done (as far as the briefing) before leaving the country, meaning less time delay when I get back. I might not get a placement in Japan. As long as both plans don’t fall through, I’ll have a decision made for me, but if I got accepted for both, I’d honestly have a hard time deciding which route to follow.

On top of this, I have an old school friend going inter-railing with some of his uni mates, and he’s invited me to tag along, at least for the eastern bloc portion of the trip. He’s been planning this every summer since college, invited me every time and not gone through with it apparently because of me going off and doing something else. I’ve told him I’m not making any promises this year, but I’ll keep the dates free if I’m not already shipped to Japan by this point and see how the money is. I’d really like to see eastern Europe, and chances are this is the last time, for the next few years of my life, I’ll have enough consecutive free time to do such a thing.

There’s also a trip to Mt Blanc in July with the university hiking club. This will be requiring specialist equipment, and take up ten days. Following this, there’s the OTC’s annual trip to Bavaria in August. If I attend this, it’ll make summer camp no longer the last thing I do with the OTC, and hence more miss-able. If I make it to Bavaria, this means I won’t have made it to Japan; Bavaria will be the last thing I do with the OTC before heading towards the AAC.

But then besides Japan and the army, what about my other life goals. I have several commercial website ideas I want to pioneer. The job in Japan would probably give me time to make a good stab at it, while I’d have no time to do it in the army. I’d have to wait until I’m back on civy street, by which point someone will probably have come up with my idea and beaten me to making a (unlikely) fortune from it.

TL;DR: So here I am at this junction, with roads going off in every direction, and I need to decide my destination between the lights turn green. Some of the roads are linked while others go off in totally different directions with no U-turns. The next two months of decision making will probably be the toughest ever. I wonder which decision I’d least regret, but each case has too many pros and cons to consider seriously. To have an application fail, while deflating ego, would also be an welcome pointer in the opposite direction.

There are a few things France is famous for, for example a lax attitude to health and safety, and patisserie. There are a few things England is famous for, such as health and safety fascism, and obesity. The thing the countries have in common: mutual banter. The rivalry between the nations is probably the highest between any two European countries, but I’m sorry, Britain’s just stabbed itself in the foot, and can go hang it’s head in shame.

Yesterday I was at the university canteen, and I saw a lone  pain au chocolat, (for those uninformed, scroll to the bottom of this page for a photo). The dialogue went something like this:

Me: Hi, is it possible to have one of these warmed up?

Staff 1: Sorry?

Me: Can I have this put in a microwave for half a minute?

Staff 2: Yeh sure, help yourself.

Me: How much does it cost? [mumble to friends: I bet £3 or more]

Staff 2: 95p

Satisfied, I take it to the till, and ask for a bottle of Fanta. The lady informs me that the fridge isn’t working, so it wont be cold, I tell her that really doesn’t bother me, and pay for the drink and pain au chocolat. After a brief awkward silence:

Me: So, where can I get this warmed up?

Staff 2: Did you ask me if I could have it warmed up?

Me [with friends nodding in agreement]: Actually I did.

Staff 2: We can’t do that.. can we?

Staff 3 [manager?]: Nope, sorry

I’ve never willingly had a cold pain au chocolat in my life. I love how it goes soft and chewy when microwaved, or crispy when grilled, and however cooked, the molten chocolate oozes out at one end as you bite the other, and burns your lap. Like pizza, they’re made to be hot, only cretins like them cold; to have one cold is a disappointment I suffer only as a survival option.

Me: Why not?

Staff 2: We don’t know what the effects of heating one up are, its health and safety regulations, sorry.

Me: You’re kidding?

Staff 2 [without a hint of irony]: For all we know, it might actually turn poisonous and kill you.

Looking back, I’m wondering how, with this “everything must be the right temperature” policy, she got away with selling me a warm Fanta.

Now, I do travel to France quite a lot, and you’d be right in saying that the French don’t really cook their pastries. In fact, at a service station near Paris I had to explain to them that by “pain au chocolat chaud” I wasn’t being a retarded tourist asking for a loaf of bread with hot chocolate. The reason for this is, in France, especially the south where I go, the bakeries present the food on a stall outside the shop. Down there in the Mediterranean heat, you can’t NOT have a warm and crispy pain au chocolat, oven or not. It turned out the woman was Romanian and had no idea what a pain au chocolat was either. Her French supervisor told me this himself, while putting it in the oven. Several months before, and back on English soil, I was at a service station and made the same request. The pimple face on the other side of the counter looked at me horrified, and went to ask the manager. I thought it was maybe his first day on the job, and he wanted to know how to use the microwave. Wrong. He came out, and told me no, it can’t be done, for health and safety reasons.

Either way, I just opened up the pain au chocolat, the very one she sold me, I put it in the microwave, blasted it with 800 watts for 30 seconds, and devoured every last crumb. It tasted awesome; I don’t appear to be dead yet, I’ll keep you informed of the side effects.

Crispy molten goodness. Mmmmmmmm...

TL;DR: Health and Safety regulation wont let me have pain au chocolat- a food made to be heated up- heated up. Maybe its a conspiracy to get people off continental breakfasts and back to fried bread, aka. shit.

Coming home from London Euston, I realised the train was running late, and that I was going to miss my connection at Warrington. This meant I wasn’t going to be in Manchester in time for the meal with friends, and I had a feeling that my due connection was the last train of the night. As the train finally arrived in Warrington, the driver announced apologetically that we were late because of vandals throwing stones at the trains further up the line, which didn’t make me feel any better about the delay, but at the same time, not much worse about it either. As I hopped off and wandered the platform in the rain, a tannoy announced that it was sorry for the inconvenience, this is when I got angry:

You what? You’re a robot, how could you possibly understand the concept of inconvenience, let alone feel sympathy or regret for it? Do you honestly expect me to believe that you’ve turned all sentient and capable of emotion and its (dis)comforts? I’m glad I’m only thinking this, because I refuse to yell at an inanimate object. I don’t know if anyone can tell, but right now I’m silently raging at the fact that Network Rail had to employ a computer to absorb all their shame. Right now they’re probably fast asleep in bed, when they should be the ones getting yelled at!

This (with a swearword inserted at every other syllable and mostly thought up in uppercase) is the moment I realised why I don’t want robots taking our jobs. Because you can’t yell at robots. I actually prefer the Hollywood robot future, where robots become sentient and take over the world, because at least they can genuinely apologise for what they’ve done. If our future to be built by the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation then I’m not interested.

I’m reminded now of an idea for a comic book a friend came up with back in college. What we need is a computer to be in charge of the world, and the computer is to be powered by happiness of the people, and itself feel happy to not be shut down.

This morning I logged into FaceBook and witnessed an all new low. People, people who I previously considered quite intelligent, were joining a group titled “I WILL NOT PAY £3.99 A MONTH TO USE FACE BOOK FROM JULY 9TH 2010!“. Now I’m going to resist explaining for the umpteenth time who I can tell just from face value that the group’s a con, because quite frankly, if you’re still falling for this tripe after being raised by the internet itself, I believe we’re past the point of convincing you otherwise.
Now this sort of group isn’t new to FaceBook, but it’s what’s unique about the discovery that really diminishes my faith in humanity, so much so that I’m tempted to give sheep a slightly more elevated status in my appreciation for how gullible and conformist people can be. Curious, I clicked the link in the quest for references. I wanted to know where people were getting the idea from that FaceBook would actually charge £3.99 per month. £3.99. THREE NINETY NINE, as if the ridiculous figure couldn’t make the stench of deceit any more potent. Sorry. Will resume resisting.

So anyway, I step through the door- with a pocket full of posies- to see what blighted doom lay on the other side. The answer? Football. Suddenly everything is explained, and from this point on, I’m going to find it very hard to express myself; I am officially speechless. A single post by the groups creator reads:

UEFA Champions League
This is the group that is devoted to the UEFA Champions league. It has the results, upcoming fixtures, standings, schedules, teams, players, scores and news. We also want to hear the opinions of fans…

OK, so lets take it one step at a time. As I write this, there are currently 2,043 “likes” and 5,325 comments. At first I expected the usual 50:50 split of people whining in hysterics about how they’ll never conform (oh the irony), to people trying to explain that it’s all a hoax and there’s nothing to worry about. Then I re-read the initial post, and thought maybe there’d actually be some discussion about football. Again, I was amazed. Firstly not a single comment about football; people were actually responding to a post they hadn’t even read! Less amazing was that my initial ratio prediction was way off. Waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay off all the way beyond the Urals somewhere. Not a single sceptic to try explaining the hoax. Maybe like me they’ve realised there’s just no hope any more, and they have better things to do (like blog about it - hah!). I was staring at 100% hysteria, examples (named and shamed), I’ve picked out the most amusing, ironic and moronic:

Matt ‘Crisis Mc’ Spooner - FUCK YOU!!!

Johnny Campbell - Yea great idea facebook, charge us millions who use a service that crashes freezes, and can’t connect to brilliant move…not!!!!!, tell you what when you get all these and more issues sorted maybe we will cosider a small fee to use, but at the time being no way, my space is shite bebo is even worse twitter is bollocks, so get a grip facebook i will leave the day you charge, cheerio

Florence Owusu Afriyie - WHILST WE ARE PAYING TO ENHANCE AND LEVEL UP ON OUR GAMESON FB, I WILL NOT PAY £3.99 FROM JULY 2010 TO USE FACE BOOK, NO WAY!!!!!!!!

Nicola Parslow - No way I’d rather spend £48 a year towards visiting friends in the real world!

Michael Soulfunky Grierson - you can kiss my arse you greedy fuckers …i join to make a site called freebook …cunts

Though in humanity’s defence, I have just seen this, and can breathe once more:

Peter Davis - You stupid people, Facebook are NOT charging, over a million conned already by this group. How many of you are going to come away from this fiasco with your credit card details and passwords intact?

Peter Davis, a high-five is being fed-ex’d to you right now.

I WILL NOT PAY £3.99 A MONTH TO USE FACE BOOK FROM JULY 9TH 2010! has over 1 million members, and no where does it explain that FaceBook has or has not made such a proposition, and a quick check on Google (who I refuse to pay 10p per search for, starting next month) shows that FaceBook never did make such a proposal. This is a perfect example of how the masses can form a mountain of opinion from a molehill of something which barely even qualifies as rumour. It makes me cringe.

The truth is, companies like FaceBook and Google make their money by being free for the end user. By being a free service, anyone with an internet connection has access to it, which makes the site more attractive to investors and advertisers, which combined make more revenue than a market equilibrium on the end-user’s side could ever achieve. To charge as much as just a few pennies would be detrimental (think of the huge ratio of users who are probably too young to even have a card to make the online payment with); £3.99 per month is, as 1 million people have just demonstrated, suicide, which is exactly why it would never happen.

Day 1: I have no trousers! quick sprint to the shops before meeting the gang at South Mimms. 75% off a £100 pair somehow makes £33, but still, not bad!
Rob just piped himself onto the boat. what a f’ing sailor.

Day 2: 0030hrs, just woken up in Paris, and wow, its that factory which always looks strangely beautiful in the night light.. feeling so nostalgic, the lights, billboards, Renaults and Peugeots zipping by at the speed of sound.. It’s been a while since i last came here..
0100 to 0600 hrs, constantly woken up by driver slamming on the breaks at toll booths on the motorway and traffic lights in Lyon. Hey, my uncle works here!
0800 hrs, woken up to snow snow snow, we have chains right? Hey, that ski runs a black right? it seems awful steep, not sure I want to do this ski stuff any more…
1600 hrs, First lesson: Whenever I brake I seem to veer off to one side, this isn’t promising..

Day 3: Snowed 20cm, any trace of last nights snowball fight gone. Button lifts. Quick refresher then and afternoon in the green runs. Is this what you call ice? It seems terribly steep. Permission to cack myself sir.

Day 4: back on yesterdays green runs. Ice with no powder seems even worse. We try a blue run. Suddenly the steep ice at the end of the green seems like nothing. This book I’m reading says that ski slopes are a good place to pick up girls. Apparently the symptoms of fear can fool a person into thinking they’re falling in love.

Day 5: Taken the morning off, I can’t get my ski boots changed until midday. Sigh. Pool with Falicia before she steals my bed, guess I’m taking a nap in the dining room. Taking the lift on the left eh? This goes on for miles. Miles… more miles. Mega steepness eh. C-Party. Go out to find every ATM in the town is still out of order. This probably saved me a lot of money, but how does this town not get bankrupt with no money? Staying in at the bar, birthday girl wants to dance with us.. uhh.

Day 6: Moar ski. Mt Blanc run. Again for good measure. Paid €11.80 for Powerade and plate of chips. Night time: Aquatic phys, rock climbing and ridiculous changing room system. Herrero deliberately slips over in the ice and smacks Nigora in the face, KAPOW, blinding her for a whole 30 mins. Come home to chicken n chips. Best chicken ever.

Day 7: MT Blanc plus more. Rave night, shove these flashing white and red torches under this wig: I am the Disco Police!Epic pickup fail, sometimes I don’t get girls…

Day 8: Final ski day. Went up en mass, beginners and pros in same group. Found ourselves on a red slope, which didn’t seem all that tough. Half pipe through the woods was awesome. Descended into Val D’Isere, not a single celebrity spotted, but can has BSP now :D. Afternoon plans foiled by a blizzard. Come on lads, we can do this.. no? aww…
Stayed in for the night, pool(-table) side disco! That “Coke” rly caught up with me…

Day 9: Adj doesn’t seem to understand there’s 3 stops but only 2 sides to the coach. Chee vs Becky in chair war.. lol. Screenwash frozen. Rob, are you piping yourself on again? Stranded in Folkstone? Nope? OK good.

*Topic for #Veronicas: Tignes Nightclub, Jagerbulls for €5! Fancy dress mandatory for all MSUOTC personnel, Tonight: Ravers outfits!
*Ocdt_Duvigneau has joined #Veronicas
*Ocdt_Woods has joined #Veronicas
*Ocdt_Duvigneau is taking a break from the dance floor
[pm to Ocdt_Woods] BLARRRR DRUNKEN LALALALALALA
*Semi_Attractive_Girl has joined #Veronicas
*Semi_Attractive_Girl is now known as Girl_A
*Girl_B has joined #Veronicas
[Girl_A] HEy! U R Alex Woods, I KNO U LOL!
*Ocdt_Woods and Ocdt_Duvigneau look at each other, wondering who this girl is.
[Girl_A] i live just across teh roAD FROM U! dont u recognise me????
*Ocdt_Duvigneau Checks this girl out, notices less-attractive Girl_B standing behind her but pays no attention
[pm to Ocdt_Woods] Dude, you gotta stop pulling this trick off, everyone seems to know you in this town. shall i tell her about the fact your girl friend is in this roo- *interupted*
[pm from Girl_B] HEY! WHERE R U FROM?????
[Ocdt_Duvigneau] ………………… Luton.
[Girl_B] OMG! Im leik, from Harpenden!
[Girl_B] :D :D :D
[Ocdt_Duvigneau] … Haven’t heard of it :/
[Girl_B] :|
[Girl_B] :(
[Girl_B] D:
[Girl_B] YOU WHAT? ITS THE NEXT FCUKING TOWN!!!!111oneone *RAGE!!!!!* :@
[Ocdt_Duvigneau] I’m kinda new to the area…
*Girl_B interupts Girl_A who is still telling Alex how she knows him
[Girl_B] this fucking CUNT doesnt know where harpenden is, AND HE LIVES IN LUTON
[Ocdt_Duvigneau] i’ve lived there 2 days… Perhaps you could show me around :D
[Girl_B] Come on, We’re fucking leaving.
*Girl_B grabs Girl_A (who is still talking to woods) by the wrist and drags her out the bar
*Ocdt_Duvigneau chuckles to himself
*Ocdt_Woods :S

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.

Dear Sir

Firstly thank you for visiting MSUOTC on Wednesday 11th November to hear our thoughts. I’m sending this email to add my own unheard thoughts for 42’s consideration.

1) What we get issued doesn’t cover our needs for field training. In many cases, the income OCdts receive from training is not only used to pay for rent and food, but also on personal equipment such as thermals, torches and supplements to the ration packs. Without being able to pay for additional equipment, our training suffers.

2) When I come home from weekends training (the few of them that still remain), I’m returning from a solid 48 hours hard work. I’m then greeted by an unemployed flatmate. Even before the pay cut, she would earn a higher hourly rate than myself from benefits alone, while future officers now go about their jobs unrewarded.

3) After having politicians already lie to us, about why we should lay our lives down in Afghanistan and Iraq, and hence quashing my life-long desire to join the forces, I’m still undecided about if a career in HM Forces is something I wish to be involved with. With the pay cut (after suffering from a, frankly, already shoddy JPAC payment system riddled with database errors and late payments), I can’t help but feel disillusioned further. If I was to take on a military career, just how many nasty surprises would I have to contend with? I know that life isn’t any easier on Civvy Street, but this is the Army, and I’ve learnt to expect better.

What we all need is some good news.

Thanks for your time reading this.

OCdt Duvigneau

MSUOTC BCoy & Website Admin

The Map - This is a map of the German position, with details, as given to the commander.

The Original Orders - Due to changing circumstances, the original plan of attack became obsolete…

Feel free to have a go at coming up with a solution, I’d be interested to know what you came up with, and if you made any common mistakes. Just copy and paste the original map, and doodle all over it.

Our Solution - We came startlingly close to what really happened…

What Really Happened - …but as the story shows, in war there are no real solutions, the result’s just the same.

For those of you into this sort of thing, I recommend purchasing Company of Heroes