• Personal Posts

    My year as a child soldier

    ARMY cadets in Plymouth have been banned from carrying rifles in public just days before they were due to take part in a Remembrance festival. (The Herald) Yes, I did carry a rifle before I was eighteen years of age — for a year. Along with my fellow members of the Air Training Corps (ATC) I also learned how to assemble a Bren gun and recognize enemy aircraft from their silhouettes (Second World War Focke-Wulfs and Messerschmitts from our new allies the Germans, because those were the only flash cards available).

  • Personal Posts

    Penny for the guy?

    What’s the longest-lived and most successful fundraising ‘ask’ ever? It has to be “Penny for the guy”. Boys in England have been asking for money from strangers in the street using this phrase for, possibly, hundreds of years, raising the equivalent of millions in the process to pay for their fireworks and festivities on the fifth of November.