There's a change in the wind direction.

Welcome to Inso’s World again and this week I have managed to get a Sunday post sorted out for Saturday instead.

This week has been a bit of a strange one with weather demanding a few changes in the order of play. First of all, I was due to be on exercise on Wednesday but due to very strong winds, the exercise had to slip to Thursday.

The exercise was a practice evacuation for a pretend island. It was geared towards training troops to deal with evacuating civilians during a time of civil unrest and rebel actions. It was to try and replicate what may happen in real life if British citizens are caught up in fighting and need to be rescued. I played a civvy for the day and had to act out a role as a local who was glad to be leaving but had a grudge with one or two of the other evacuees. That meant that I had to do a bit of shouting and pushing and shoving and generally being a small nuisance to the troops. While this was going on, rebel forces turned up and the troops had to defend themselves while making sure we were kept safe. The cool bit was that we were evacuated by Sea King helicopter to a hangar for processing and then loaded onto a Hercules for a lap of the airfield. Unfortunately, I was not allowed to take any photographs so I can’t share any of the day’s events.

All in all, it was an interesting day away from the usual sort of work I do; even if it meant quite a bit of hanging around... or ‘military milling’ as I call it.

The following day, I was due to go to Mount Usborne with a group of our lads to renovate a war memorial. We had all the equipment, paint and polish ready for the trip but this happened:

 Click the Pix!

Painting and polishing in the rain and snow wouldn’t really work so we had to scrub the trip. It looks like it will now have to wait until the warmer/dryer weather turns up later in the year because it seems that winter has finally arrived. The temperature has certainly dropped considerably over the last few days.

Fortunately, I’m only here for another couple of weeks so I won’t have to deal with too much of the colder weather. I can almost smell the home-fires burning.

See you from the airport!