yen_powell

Yes, just clearing the tubes for the medical a week later when I was sexually assaulted by the doctor.

So about a 100 blokes are sitting in a large hall with test papers and a pen each in front of them. I would say that about 70 were holding their pens the wrong way round, eating their paper or asking for crayons as they weren't allowed sharp writing implements. A large sergeant told us to turn the papers over and start answering the questions. Can't recall too much, but I think there was some basic English language questions, bit of maths and then lots of diagrams with pullies and gear wheels and you had to predict what happened to the last item in a sequence if one turned at the start followed by stuff with weights on balance arms at different distances to the fulcrum. I've always finished exams very quickly, not necessarily correctly, but speedily. At school I would be sitting bored out of my brain for an hour plus, getting glares from other pupils and teachers, so this time I took a piece of scrap paper and doodled stuff for ages instead. When the papers were finally collected, I quickly turned over my scrap paper with all the knob pictures before it was seen by the sergeant. Some people were still writing as their papers were snatched away. After we completed the tests we were taken into another room for a lecture. What it was about I have no idea, but the unexpected exercise had started taking a strange toll on everyone. There seemed to be a continuous round of farting from everyone, including me, followed by the deadliest stench permeating the room. I was in a confused state. Everyone likes the smell of their own farts, but is this still okay if everyone's smell the same?? The officer giving the lecture gulped and stopped and said that it might be best if everyone went outside for 10 minutes and got it out of their system. He kept some people back to open windows.

I am never keen, I feel out of control and see dangers that I think the rider hasn't. But I'm the same in the passenger seat of a car. On holiday sometimes we hire a car and one of us drives out for the evening, then after drink is taken on board we get a cab back, leaving the car in town. In the morning someone has to go on the back of a scooter or motorbike to collect the car. My 73 year old mate has the habit of weaving about, I swear he tries to get every pot hole he sees, like a game of pothole Bingo. I cringe in fear on the back, my only consolation is if he's driving on the correct side of the roa, depending on which country we are in. My other mate rides in and out of London all week and he is definitely an unhappy pillion behind me. He is carrying a bit of extra weight so he's usually tightly wedged between me and the top box. He will shout out that a traffic light has turned red, like I haven't seen it. It is usually on the horizon and will change 2 or 3 times before we even get near. When I bought my 3rd Africa Twin I had to go to Norwich. I asked my friend Charlie to give me a lift. His bike was a GSXR110, bit of a beast. The rear seat was tiny, I had trouble bending my legs enough to get them on the rear pegs. When he finally hit the on ramp to the A12 dual carriageway he gunned it and not only did I nearly fall off the back, he hit a lump in the road at the same time and I went up in the air as well. I shit myself. Later on when we left the A12 and got onto a smaller road (A140??) where he went round a roundabout so fast I swear my ear was on the tarmac. I had had enough by then and made him pull over and swap positions and I rode it with him on the back the rest of the way.

After the gymnasium we were led into another room to be shown various big bangy guns and allowed to play about removing some of the parts. Back then the T.A. were still using the self loading rifle which I'd only seen my action man using in the 1970s. The real army had moved on and were regretting it I recall, their new gun had a habit of falling in half at critical moments. This SLR was placed in my hands and I don't know how my Action Man coped, no wonder his realistic hands fell apart. It weighed a ton. Sod running about with that. We were also shown the general purpose machine gun we would be using if we passed and were accepted. I say we, it was a three man team on a machine gun they said, someone to load, someone to pull the trigger and someone to say, "Shoot at him Geoffrey, he looks a bit foreign to me". You've probably seen them before, big thing, tripod or bipod, belt feed and a load of spare barrels. I hadn't realised till then that you had to change barrels if firing for a long time, at least that was what I was told. I had never seen John Wayne have to do this, must be inferior equipment. We also got handed some sort of hand held rocket launcher thing and what we all excitedly called a sten gun, but apparently was actually a Sterling. After this it was lunch time, more ready made super sweet mugs of tea, some not too bad food and me wolfing as much of their sticky syrup fruit salad afters as possible for energy, because the basic fitness test was coming up later on that day. We were driven in lorries to another part of Colchester, a large green, some M.O.D housing and a rectangle of roads. A week after the events I'm writing about took place, a military policeman was badly injured in the same place when his car exploded. The car bomb had been set by the IRA, the MP lost both legs and some fingers. We sort of forget about the IRA nowadays with all that's happening in the world, but terrorist bombs were quite common on the UK mainland when I was growing up. The last one I remember was the one in Canary Wharf which put our jerry built office in docklands into a permanent tilt despite it being about 200 metres away from the explosion. Anyway, with freshly rolled trouser legs I listened as a large red faced man in a track suit explained that it was a 2km run which had to be completed in 11 minutes to pass. You started by walking quickly and as you passed a certain point you started running and were timed from that point. Well off I went, legs in all directions, my boiler suite billowing. 2 minutes later I was ready to bring my dinner back up. 8 minutes later I am looking for a hole to put my foot in so I can twist my ankle and cry off. That's when the twats who had paid attention in the morning chat grabbed me, team work you see. Despite me crying and telling them all to fuck off, they dragged me along. I think I came in 30 seconds over the 11 minutes. I was doubled over ready to honk, but this NCO started screaming at me not to bend forward, to stand up straight and to definitely not besmirch his nice clean grass. After my head had stopped throbbing, we all piled back on to the lorries and then waited for the man with the ball bag slings to walk in, he was still waddling along it seemed. I say piled back on, I think it took me a few attempts to get in. It was back to the hall which was now filled with desks. It was intelligence test time!

No unfortunately.

So this officer is giving a 100 blokes a talk in some sort of a hall. First he gave a history of the regiment which due to cut backs was about 10 regiments all joined together. He said that this battalion was nicknamed The Steel Backs because they never cried out when being flogged around the time of Waterloo. I'm in trouble here I thought, I'd cry like a baby when they took my shirt off if it was chilly. He makes the mistake of going on about team work which was to come back and haunt me later. Next we are all taken outside and they attempt to teach some sort of drill. My version of marching was different to everyone else's. Try moving left leg and left arm at the same time and crouching and you'll probably be as good as I was. I must have looked like the hunchback of Notre Dame after he'd not paid his tailor's bill. Next we were whisked off to an assault course. This thing was mostly made of mud with a few brick walls, ditches and climbing frames mixed in. We were taken to each obstacle and taught the best way to tackle it. I was shagged just walking around them. There was a wall about 10 feet high. This NCO grabbed me and made me stand facing it with arms outstretched. Then he got two other blokes to place their palms on the floor and I had to stand on their hands. Luckily my overalls had unravelled round the ankles which cushioned them a bit. He then told them both to lift at the same time and I would magically go up the wall and be able to grab the top and pull myself up. In theory this is fine, but when the two wankers lifting are of different heights and ability, all it did was tip me over side ways head first into the mud. After I had got up and rubbed the mud in to my hair properly, he then showed us a better way, which was one bloke putting his back against the wall, crouching down and put both hands together whilst I ran at him, slapped a shitty boot into his hands and as he lifted, I jumped and I got to the top of the wall. One miscalculation and he could have had the boot in his balls mind you. Back to the start and we did the whole thing properly. I was not fit, my days of long distance running at school were 6 plus years behind me. I would have to use brains to pass this thing. So whenever any of the NCOs with a clip board was watching I ran like a hero, all arms, legs and determination. When I was out of sight I whimpered and dribbled and crawled slowly. When we got the the 10 foot wall, the dim bloke who had my sleeping bag somehow managed to fall with a leg each side of it. He gave a terrible scream and had to be lowered to the ground and taken away to have his bollocks put in a sling by a medic. We didn't see him for the next few hours. After the assault course we were taken to the mess hall for breakfast. I lined up and found the the tea urns didn't just have plain black tea in them. It was already mixed with the milk and about 400 sugar lumps by the taste of it. My hands were a bit shaky from the assault course so I dropped my first cup of tea all over the floor. After mopping that up I got another one and moved on to the food queue. Some army cook type geezer, all acne and flaky skin asked me if I wanted two bits of bacon. I said yes and he grinned as he cut my single piece into two pieces. I wolfed my breakfast, glugged my tea, glugged another mug of tea and then it was marching off to a gymnasium. In the gym they did all sorts of PT tests. Hanging off bars to see how many pull ups you could do, timed climbing of ropes, flinging yourself over a vaulting horse etc. The worst one was hanging upside down off some wall bars and doing sit ups. My stomach was still hurting from that a week later when they sent me for a medical, more on that later.

When I was about 22 my sweaty friend encouraged me to have a go at joining the T.A. He said if I joined now, they were about to head for Germany for shooty bangy type stuff and I'd get free time off from my employer. What's the worst that could happen I thought. So a month or so later I present myself at a building near Tilbury and myself and 5 or 6 others boarded a Bedford truck which headed off to Colchester to join a group of about a 100 blokes from various corners of Essex and Suffolk. I was signed in, given a sleeping bag with a busted zip, a pair of overalls 42 times too big for me, a number on a piece of cloth, some safety pins and directed to a bunk in a Victorian cavalry barracks. Stables below, sleeping areas above. This was next to a parade ground that seemed to go to the horizon and lots of other brick and black wooden buildings. Anyone who has watched Blackadder Goes Forth would recognise it as it was used in the opening titles where the band marches playing the theme tune and Baldrick finishes with a tap on his triangle. It's now a Wimpey or similar housing estate. First things first, there was a dim but large bloke in our group. When he wasn't looking I swapped my sleeping bag with his. We then had to put our overalls on and pin our numbers to our chests. I rolled my trouser legs up about 10 times till they only just brushed the floor. The really tall bloke next to me who's overalls were too short refused to swap with me so was left looking like a toddler in a romper shorts combo. As we were called out for a talk by some bloke in a peaked cap I could hear the dim bloke moaning about his broken zipped sleeping bag.

His Mrs scared me a bit if I'm honest.

Sweaty friend was in the Territorial Army, a machine gunner in the Royal Anglian Regiment. His dog ate his beret and he needed me to take him to Silvermans to buy a new one. Silvermans, if you don't know, is a famous Jewish surplus store in Stepney, they sell everything. My friend had nodded off in the passenger seat, he's wearing light grey jogging bottoms. He woke up when we parked outside and when he got out he had erm.... developed down below, god know what he was dreaming of. He had no shame though and proceeded to walk into the shop with this thing waving left and right in front of him. When he got inside I swear it made a noise when it hit the glass fronted cabinet.

Google is your friend.

Ignoring The French Fleet for a while, my sweater mate story. As I said before, his hormones often got the better of him, not just through sweat but a constant chase of women. He met a girl at a works do and before you know it, they were living together in Stanford le Hope and planning a wedding. The wife to be's mother had seen a photo of me with long hair, leather jacket and holey jeans and had forbidden me being invited to the wedding. I'd had my hair cut and happened to call on my mate when she was there one day. I was charm itself, so smarmy you'd have been sick, but she seemed to like it. I was waiting and sure enough she asked me if I was coming to the wedding and I was able to tell her I was banned for being a scruff. Anyway, wedding happened, I'm at the reception, barmaid serving me made some comment about that creepy bloke over there keeps pawing the bride, him old enough to be her dad as well. Then the creepy man walked over and I introduced her to the groom! To be fair he thought it was funny when he found out. A few years go by and my mate starts chatting up a mother and daughter pair of cleaners at his work. For some unknown reason he comes home to wifey and announces he loves one of them (daughter at the time I think). She does her raving narna and orders him to ring this woman up and tell her he's not allowed to be with her, then all will be well between them. He does this and his wife then asks him all sweetness and light to get something from the shop for her. He was just going out the door when he remembered 'last number redial' and ran back in. He found wifey threatening death and dismemberment down the phone line, then she turned on him and said she wanted a divorce and to pack his bags and go. So they both moved back home with their parents, they had not long had a baby so she was with the wife. I'd just been given a lease car by work and he asked me if I could take him to pick up some clothes etc. Off we went, me trying not to filter in a car. When we got there he couldn't get the key in the lock. It was full of superglue. He managed to get that out in one piece and open the door. Inside the place was bare. Every item of furniture except one was gone. The light bulbs had gone. The fuses from the fuse box had gone, the handles from the cupboards were gone. He knocked on a neighbour's door and he said a large removal van had been there and he hadn't thought anything of it. My mate got a bit emotional, I was hungry. The one remaining piece of furniture was a display cabinet in the front room. It had some framed family photographs with him cut out of each one and some easter eggs. I asked him if I could have a bit of easter egg as I hadn't had any breakfast. He said fine in a heartbroken voice. I was just chomping on one when he said he hoped she hadn't done anything to the easter eggs. I went and spat it out. He rang the wife up and she denied any knowledge of what had happened. He came off the phone and said as her dad owned a storage company he didn't believe her. I said if she said she wasn't involved he needed to report it to the police. I took him to the local station and he did so. They rang wifey up and she said she had all the goods stored away, no problem officer etc. They told him and he rung her up a few minutes later after coming back outside the police station. But she just repeated that she knew nothing about it to him. Later on he moved back into the Standford le Hope place and moved the mother and daughter cleaner in with him. By now it's the mother he is with, it all got a bit confusing. Eventually he fell behind with his mortgage payments and they all got rehoused by the council. The mother and daughter then forced him to leave.

It wasn't a total disaster, they weren't 'Titian blonde' pubes like yours. I have a story about him, I will put that up now.

I did. This bloke was a proper sweater. I first saw him when I was 11, he was in a different class to me at school, but the classes were combined for games. We had just partaken in my first ever game of Rugby, we were covered in mud, wounds and blood. We had all just tramped back into the changing room. We got a talk from the Welsh games teachers about how we need not worry about stripping off together for a communal shower. It took me a few years to realise that all UK games teachers are Welsh sadists. The speech was along these lines, 'Look you boys isn't it, who's coat is this jacket, get you into those showers, none of you has anything that the others don't have so don't you be worrying butt, by the way I use a shower cap for my Keegan perm'. Well they were wrong. 44 boys were pink and hairless, but number 45 (my mate) was a bit further along the puberty motorway and heading for the off ramp. There was hair all over the poor sod, it was like Grendel at the waterhole!

My friend who is 73 loved getting a discount at all the various bike shows. I think they have realised that hardly anyone under 65 is going because some have stopped doing the discount for pensioners.

You do get to know a kick start bike's own individuality. When I had my first stent in, I was trying to stay in and not move about too much, but my friend, who should have known better decided he was going to start enduro racing. He was not the fittest of people or in the first flush of youth. He'd bought a nearly new Gas Gas 4 stroke, a 400 or 450 I think. This thing self destructed at least twice in a very short ownership and had an engine rebuild each time. It would also have a few break downs on the road in that same period. So I made my way over to Kent to a place called Canada Heights and watched my mate leave the starting line and disappear down a wooded hill and that was the last we saw of him for a very long time. Eventually he appeared over the crest of the hill on foot drenched in sweat. He'd drained the battery trying to restart the bike on the button after repeated stalls and begged for someone else to have a go at getting it back up the hill if he could get it started. As I walked gingerly down the hill I found a man frantically trying to kick start and early DR350 with the manual decompressor thing on the handlebar, exactly the same model I had fallen off a zillion times whilst green laning. I asked if I could have a go and started it first or second kick, a few years of anger and frustration had taught me the technique for that one bike. Anyway, we got to the Gas Gas and that was when he gave me his helmet to put on to ride the short distance up the slope. Jesus, I think the entire fluid content of his whole body (and he was a big bloke) was in the lining. It positively squelched as I put it on.

A work colleague (head of Road Safety) had his KH250, a non runner, in his front garden. The little cam that drove the points had worn away or something he said and it had sat in his garden for years. One night he heard someone trying to steal it. He could hear them trying to kick start it. He told me he let them try for ages, only shouting out to scare them off when they were properly knackered.

Oh, yeah, junior Choice. My Old man's a Dustman. The Laughing Policeman. The Happy Birthday song!!

I was singing this as I pedalled today

You do that as well eh. It drives me mad, I sing to myself for the whole journey, even if I only know a single line and hate the song.

Everyone forgets about the CX500 replacement now, it was there and then it wasn't. The VT500

Filth!!!!

They all look the same to me.

You probably know it as a CB500X