As most of those in my embarrassingly small (but delightful, and hand picked(?) - each one of you!) readership may already have devined, I have a military background. It was well over twenty years ago that I left it all behind; it was the Royal Navy and I was glad to get out, but I do nevertheless have some small part of me formed by that experience.

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Tonight, at the end of a day of breadmaking, sundried (well, OK, oven dried) tomato making and enduring an ESB (think LEB or whomever your electricity provider "of choice" is) power cut of several hours, I allowed myself a wallow in some musical nostalgia that took me back to my basic naval training.

On my hard drive I have a file under the "music" tab containing several downloads listed as "unknown album". I decided to tidy this up, so imagine my delight at one of the "unknown" tracks being something from my very earliest navy days! I won't pretend that I was 100% content in the navy. As a nurse I spent the vast majority of my time in Naval Hospitals (a vanished, class ridden and inverse snobbery driven society) but was only truly happy at sea, where I felt myself to be part of a special and supposedly ephemeral brotherhood (I remain in touch with my shipmates; hospital colleagues much less so).

Anyway, back to my musical memory. I was sixteen, brought up on a small island and suddenly what might as well have been a million miles from home (not a bad thing as it happens, but that is a story for another day). On Saturday afternoons, just before I joined up, I used to listen to a programme on Radio One (yes, THAT Radio One) that captured my imagination. Paul McCartney had acrimoniously split from The Fab Four and was furiously trying to establish an independent musical credibility. This was to go spectacularly wonky later, but for now, he had a direct connection to the zeitgeist. On this programme he demo-ed the somewhat edgy (and later banned by the Beeb) song "Hi Hi Hi" in which he codified his enjoyment of cannabis and the song featured here which, according to wikipedia has equally, but less controversially, establishment mocking lyrics. Oh, how cutting edge it all was back then.

Later, somewhat isolated by my artistic sensiblities and with the homesickness of a sixteen year-old who has suddenly realised that he isn't as grown up as he thought he was, that same song came on the radio.

It was a Saturday afternoon in November, and those of us too shy or tired to negotiate the delights of early seventies Torpoint Town sporting a crewcut and dressed in full uniform - this was a time when the mullet was de riguer (even Macca had one) and servicemen were despised by some - had just been marched back from the barracks cinema where the compulsory entertainment for those not "going ashore" had taken place (a worn print of "Gunfight at the OK Corral" as it happens). I flopped on to my metal sprung bed, turned my Grundig Radio Boy on and this little piece of sanity, of civilisation, of who I really was, squeaked out of the speaker: