A New Beginning

Not for me, but for No. 1 Son. It’s odd, but he passed his Army Officer Selection Board nearly three years ago, and at the time it seemed that his going to Sandhurst was such a long time away, and now he's there!

He decided that he was going to have his last night out last Friday in Tunbridge Wells and invited lots of friends and all the family for a curry night and then he and the friends were going off clubbing. However, from the start, things did not go completely according to plan.

He had decided that he was having the night out some time ago, but the first spanner in the works was his mother, who had decided that as I was going to be there, she was not. I did find this a little selfish on her part in that she was unwilling to put her animosity to one side for the sake of her son, but ultimately that's her loss.

And, because he'd chosen an Indian restaurant to have the meal in, he inadvertently excluded m'Julie, as she doesn't do spicy food because it does not have a good effect on her.

I was also not at my best, having gone down with my third "bug" in almost as many weeks. A week before Christmas, I'd had a chest infection, and then, having recovered from that, I went down with a cold on Christmas Day, and then last Thursday had another cold, with gastrointestinal "extras". m'Julie was convinced that I had swine flu and did a runner to her mother's.

So it was in a somewhat subdued state that I picked up No. 2 Son and my Daughter and drove to the restaurant, where I ate not very much and left early with the kids.

No. 2 Son didn't ,mind too much as it gave him the opportunity to get home here and sort out which are his PS3 games to take home to his mother's now that he has his own PS3, bought from a friend last week.

The plan on Saturday was to collect No. 1 Son, make sure that he was all sorted and then make sure that he had an early night before the trip on Sunday. However, because he was a. Hungover and b. A bit disorganised, he was ready to move out until nearly 8pm! So much for the early night.

We got up quite late and at lunchtime, after Alec had said his goodbyes to the rest of the family, father and son set of for the uneventful journey to Surrey.

We made good time and so stopped off at the Camberley Tesco’s for a coffee and lunch. Alec successfully blended in with all the other smartly dressed young men and women looking very nervous.

After this very quick lunch we made the short trip to the Academy and joined the queue of traffic that was making its way to the parade square to park, Alec managing to get a couple of pictures of New College through the trees as we slowly drove.

Once we arrived, things happened very rapidly. I went off to have coffee whilst Alec was off filling in paperwork, then the families were taken to the chapel to be addressed by the Commandant and Old College Commander. Then it was back to the car to help Alec get all his kit into his room, prior to a quick goodbye and my heading home.

We'd been told during the talk that all of the new Officer Cadets would be kept busy and would be getting used to eighteen hour days during the next few weeks, and we could see that in the little time that we had to say goodbye.

So that's it now for five weeks, which is how long it is until he gets a weekend off. And clearly the long days have started as I was woken up by a text message at nearly 1am this morning telling me that he was just going to bed after a very long day that had probably started 20 hours previously.