I am remembering Ian. Ian was a mate who I served with in the Royal Navy. Ian died on 25 May 1982 when HMS Coventry was bombed and sunk during the Falklands conflict. Ian was 21, Ian and I had been ‘run ashore oppos’ for a couple of years going to rock gigs in Portsmouth […]
Fake news everything is fake news … been reflecting on this a bit recently and thinking about the subject of ‘dits’ .. a ‘dit’ is naval parlance for a ‘story’ all of which are based on fact … some of course more so than others, but that’s what a good dit should be … in […]
I dunno about you but I think music is a great medium that unites people. I used to play in bands on nearly every RN ship I served in and whenever the band played on board, at a flight deck function or ashore in a local bar or hotel, the ships company always supported us […]
Well it’s the Easter season already, that annual celebration of chocolate and bunny rabbits … reminds me of once when the ship was deployed over Easter, so I decided to show the film ‘The Passion of The Christ’ (Mel Gibsons epic film, which was quite graphic in its portrayal of Jesus suffering). I thought I’d […]
So … what are you like at saying ‘sorry’? Most blokes are not very good really, we just tend to get all introspective and mull it over and over and over and then maybe give a garbled ‘Sorry’ and then add ‘But … ‘ and go into some pathetically feeble reason why it was not […]
I was enjoying a weeks ‘station leave’ whilst the ship was alongside in Mombasa in Kenya during a stand down from a busy ‘Armilla’ patrol in the Arabian Gulf during the Iran / Iraq war in the 1980s. We had spent a few months escorting tankers in convoys through the Straits of Hormuz. The SOH […]
The world seems to be getting more and more unsettled, so much conflict and distress right across the world. I don’t know about you but often I find myself thinking that it’s all spiralling out of control and that actually there is nothing I can do, and that puts me way out of my comfort […]
In the course of our conversations with guys we come into contact with a lot of guys who have problems with addictions, normally alcohol or porn, but also drugs and other stuff too … including gambling. These things have an effect on a bloke of course, but not only on the individual also they have […]
New Year. Another one. 2017. Already. Any hopes? Dreams? Challenges? Resolutions? Plans? Of course we have no idea what lies ahead, we can make plans we can prepare for stuff but no-one actually knows for sure whether any of it will actually happen .. I am not sure how far ahead you all make plans, […]
So that’s Christmas done … it’s the time for resolutions now … so easy to make, but so hard to keep for many of us! The decision to keep going with it can be hard, but we all have hard decisions to make don’t we? Which reminds me of a decision making meeting on a […]
