A Noteworthy Day.

Today is the anniversary of my leaving home for the first time at age seventeen. I took the train (well, several trains actually) to Devon, there to take up my cadetship at the Britannia Royal Naval College, Dartmouth.

The first thing the authorities did when we got there was issue uniforms, including caps. The problem was, the cap badges hadn’t arrived, so the Captain ordered us not to wear them. Without badges, he said, we looked like a bunch of taxi drivers.

It was downhill from there on in. I hated the place. Far too much control, and I hated being controlled then, just as I do now. The only thing I enjoyed about the navy was being at sea, and that isn’t much of a reason to be in the navy, is it? That was why I left seven months later and embarked on a hedonistic lifestyle founded mostly on alcohol. The girls were important, but not that important yet. The Problem of Women was still a year away.

And I never looked back – except on every January 8^th when I recall dark evenings, even darker mornings, and being artificially subservient to men with bits of gold fabric on their sleeves.