In these digital days, the act of walking a letter down to the village post-box is a rare and slightly cathartic one, and there is something reassuringly decisive about the pushing the thing through the slot of the ivy-clad box. Late at night, for some reason, it is doubly so. Maybe it just required that little bit more commitment which, in turn, emphasised the statement.
‘Hi there’ and ‘cheers’ transform back for the moment to ‘Dear Sir’ and ‘Yours faithfully’, and the thin, immediate ‘whoosh’ noise of a departing email is replaced by the delayed diesel cough of the post van the following morning. Virtual becomes for the moment solid, which is reassuring in itself. The letter can’t go on any information superhighway; it can get stuck on the M6 like the rest of us.
Our village post-box has been there since the early nineteen fifties, and I’ll bet it’s seen a thing or two of note passing through. The letter I dropped in it last night, which is hopefully heading to Brown Street in Glasgow as we speak, will be one of the more boring ones it has hosted, other than to me.
It is a communication with the Armed Forces Pension Scheme, written to alert them that I am about to be sixty, and, following their earlier guidance and all that, would very much like to claim whatever tiny pension my grateful nation would like to bestow on me for my eight and a half years of service.
About being sixty, I have almost no emotion other than surprise and gratitude. Surprise because it never really occurred to me till a couple of months ago that I was anywhere near it. Gratitude, because most bits still seem to work, more or less, and I have been blessed with a much longer life than a small number of those colleagues with whom I shared those army years. Complaining about reaching a milestone that you should have seen coming with total precision for just under 22,000 days would be daft, and I intend to celebrate with my nearest and dearest and a huge plate of cauliflower cheese and burned bacon. Plus a bottle of very cold Mersault.
About having a pension, I actually feel rather lucky. It’s really not very big, (I checked) but I feel blessed to be getting it at all and will be tempted to write to Sajid Javid and thank him for it. For the nights I was asked to sleep in uncomfortable places, dig stupidly deep holes and have things thrown at me by people who disagreed with what I was doing, I consider it payment in full.
But the thing that pulled me up short was my reaction to the word ‘veteran’, in fact my reaction to the first line of the address: ‘Veterans UK’.
It was all a long time ago, and I have changed since then in many ways. Mostly outwards and downwards, it has to be said, but also in the surrender of all those certainties that I knew for sure as a young man, but now don’t happily have a clue about. But, in comparison to my school days which I largely disliked, those eight and a half years as a Royal Green Jacket were truly wonderful. The people I met, worked with and laughed alongside, the things we did and the problems that we tackled together, are now some of the most precious bits of the architecture of my life.
I’m not a particularly proud man, but of that bit I am. Much of whatever I became, it made, and I loved just about every second.
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