Just another day in Hollywood.

There are a few things amazing about living here – too many to write about; sometimes it's like being in a movie. All the things we have seen over the years we kind of see: yellow cabs, short muscular Irish cops and men with guns.

Today I met my wife for lunch and we went to the Sunset Grill on Sunset Boulevard – yes that Sunset Grill in the famous song; before they re-modelled the building they had the disc on the wall by Joe Walsh.

So today after my chicken quasadilles (not as good as the ones in the late lamented Last America Hamburger) I leave Margaret and head north on Gardner; Gardner, as locals will know, crosses Hollywood Boulevard and when I reached the traffic lights there the traffic along Hollywood Boulevard was being controlled by a man with a rifle.

His car was parked in the middle of the Boulevard and he was not exactly dressed as a cop – or even a gangster.

He was wearing a greenish colour baseball type of cap and was not looking for a game of baseball.

After a few minutes he called the Boulevard traffic on and left me stuck at the lights with a few cars behind me. As far as I knew the third world war could have been happening down there as there was a fat tree blocking my view; the traffic going east was non existent but as he was calling west bound traffic on I figured that whatever had happened there had happened!

After what seemed like an eternity the lights changed to green and we could cross; looking left, as I crossed Hollywood Boulevard, I could see many other men with guns, loads of cars with their lights on and . . . nothing else!

I came home and put the news on, checked Twitter and nothing.

So I sent a tweet on Twitter and as one of the people I follow is West Hollywood Daily I sent it to him. He has just replied saying Man Armed with a Rifle at Hollywood and Gardner wearing camouflage was an ATF agent serving a warrant – wow some warrant!

I don't know anywhere in Britain where you would see such an incident – it looked like a SWAT incident!!

Going on I have decided to change the title of my novel; there are just too many novels called The Storyteller. Alan Sillitoe died the other day and even he wrote one with that title – together with Saturday Night and Sunday Morning and The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner; a great writer and I am proud to say I was in one of the films adapted from one of his novels The Ragman's Daughter.

I'll leave this blog as the same title though.

My novel is for sale in quite a few places including Smashwords and Kindle in electronic books; Smashwords was easy to change, I am working on Kindle but I think it will take a bit of arranging with Amazon.com.

The new title My Friend Alfredo Hunter. I was thinking of My Friend Alfredo Hunter; genius but I have opted for the former; however nothing is final so if you have a preference let me know.

The paper back hasn't been selling too much but it sells on Kindle and Smashwords – mainly to American troops in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Mrs Gandhi and Totectors follow up.

I had a couple of e-mails asking me if I still had the picture taken with Mrs Gandhi – well there it is above; me with the white shoes - and I still had black hair in those days.

There is Mrs Gandhi with the two girls either side of her and my daughter Rebecca is the one with the dark hair; she was only fourteen going on fifteen and because of her dark looks she was 'eyed' by a few of the locals and that's what I meant when my wife said she would need her father with her in India - and she was right.

The fella beside me is Louis from Air India who came to see me in my show, A Bit of Irish, in London last year; behind him is the bodyguard who was trying to get into the picture (the shadow os him more like) and the young fella to the right of the picture is the son of the white haired weather man; the rose between the two thorns there is the teacher of the other girl who was a wonderful woman, Kate.

The last time I heard from Kate was a Christmas card which said 'I dreamt that once, long ago, I met you in India' – and nothing else! Nothing happened between us, of course, and after the trip I took my daughter to visit her and her husband in Bristol.

Her husband was from Glasgow and was very much like me; I think he had something to do with MI5 or one of the other security services and in the couple of days I spent there we must have drunk the place dry and played guitars way into the night.

After a very late night, in which Kate came down from bed to quieten us down, we went to bed and as we parted he shook my hand and said “it's a draw” - he had been trying to drink me under the table! Not that I knew this at the time.

She was obviously attracted by drinkers and revellers which is why we got on so well. The husband kind of eyed me suspiciously, when I first arrived, but by the time we left he was sure there was nothing between me and his wife; he told me this as he saw us off on the coach after another lunch time drinking session at the pub.

I don't drink to that extent any more - let's say I saw the folly of getting drunk. Don't get me wrong I still drink but not so much and just whiskey and beer these days.

I went through my stat counter the other day for this blog and I still get hits from posts I wrote 6 months ago and one in particular was about the company I worked for – Totectors – and I noticed a comment in the comments section from Robert Green who must think me very ignorant for not replying. Well I'm sorry Robert I just didn't see it.

Robert told me that Totectors went broke but 12 months or so ago a new owner brought it back to life and now Robert works for a company that retails Totectors.

After Totectors, Robert, I struggled for a bit and then I got a role in a movie called Lifeforce which helped me buy another house closer to civilisation and a few TV shows and series put me on my feet.

Now I'm in Los Angeles and, as they used to say, I'm still ducking and diving and as soon as I get everything up and running I'll be writing on here again.

Mrs Gandhi and an Englishman Abroad.

I once met Mrs Gandhi; now if you knew me you would wonder how some bum of an actor with only one TV credit in the year of 1983 could get to meet the leader of the world’s largest democracy

It had, indeed, started off as a bad year which I had inherited from the year before; in February I was offered one episode of The Angels – a BBC hospital soap – playing the role of a cop in one scene; I jumped at it; we had three kids to feed.

On the first day of rehearsals I bumped into a BBC producer, Innes Lloyd, in the lift at the BBC rehearsal rooms in North Acton – fondly known as the North Acton Hilton because of its size - and he told me that he had tried to get me for his John Schlessinger film An Englishman Abroad, with Alan Bates, but that my agent had told him I was unavailable.

As I was a big fan of John Schlessinger’s films I wasn’t very pleased; surely we could have come to some arrangement after all I was only in one scene in ‘The Angels’ and we could have…..oh it doesn’t bear thinking about.

I did my one scene – filmed at some hospital in Coventry and started to look for another agent.

When I got home one day my wife was buzzing with excitement; I couldn’t calm her down.

She had received a telephone call from The Guardian newspaper: our fourteen year old daughter, Rebecca, had won an essay writing competition and the prize was a couple of weeks in India for two.

The trip would include staying in New Delhi, Jaipur, Agra, Bombay and Lonavala staying in the best hotels and included £250 spending money - each.

The essay compared life in The Himalayas to life in England; of course Rebecca had never been to The Himalayas and her observations were taken from her geography lessons and her reading of Victor Zorza’s Indian columns in The Guardian under the title The Village Voice – which was about a village north of New Delhi and not The Himalayas at all.

I have to take the credit for pointing out the columns to her and telling her about the competition.

My wife was adamant that I should accompany Rebecca to India; it was a world away in those days – it’s a world away these days but we have seen live cricket from there – and she felt Rebecca needed her father; as it happened she was right but that’s another story.

So we set off for India: the trip was sponsored by Air India and The Guardian and judged by the editor of The Guardian, Peter Preston and my favourite Guardian columnist James Cameron – no not the Titanic/Avatar creator.

There were two other winners: a fourteen year old girl from Bristol and a nineteen year old boy from somewhere in the home counties; his father accompanied him and the girl from Bristol was accompanied by her female English teacher.

We had to have injections for cholera, typhoid and polio and took pills for malaria.

The evening before we were due to fly out to New Delhi we met and were entertained by the Indian High Commissioner and his family at his London residence; they gave us tea with warm milk and samosas; the High Commissioner and his family were charming – as it turned out it was a taste of what was to come – and when they spoke to us they shook their heads, Peter Sellers style, which was something else we saw a lot of in India.

Later that day we were installed in a really nice hotel near Gloucester Road tube station and went out to eat at a posh Indian Restaurant close by; ‘Princess Margaret comes here often’ we were told and we felt really important.

The following morning we emerged for breakfast and it seemed the father and son, from the Home Counties, had never eaten Indian food before and were feeling a bit green around the gills; they hadn’t even tried it as an experiment when they heard they were going to spend a little time in the sub-continent; this was also a sign of things to come: on our second day in India they didn’t even make it out of their room and had to postpone their trip to the Taj Mahal so we went ahead without them; I had wondered about the title of the John Schlessinger film An Englishman Abroad but in India it was slowly starting to make sense.

Their Delhi Belly, or whatever it was, deprived them of one of the greatest train journeys I have ever taken also the wonderful experience at Delhi Railway Station; it was such a huge exciting culture shock that I can still smell and taste it now: everything out of the story and picture books came to life; porters with four or five suit cases on their heads, a blind beggar and a beggar with no hands; crowds of people asleep on the platforms; bikes, rickshaws and more bikes.

There was a certain smell about the place; a smell not unpleasant although it might have been to some; a smell I got to like even though it was probably a mixture of faeces, urine and spices; the father and son missed the first class travel on that train, and from New Delhi to Agra, we were extremely comfortable in individual reclining seats – I remember thinking ‘you don’t get this in Britain!’

The food was freshly cooked and the staff on the train was at our beck and call.

The lavatories on the train gave an introduction to the Indian way of life; there were two lavatories in each cubicle: one for the western way and one for the Asian way; the Asian way was just a hole in the floor as the Asians squat whilst we, the westerners, sit on the loo.

As we looked through the windows on the train we saw plenty of evidence of this as it was early in the morning and people were going about their daily ablutions – in public; they were standing under stand pipes washing their bodies and if we saw one man squatting for a crap we saw a hundred.

I still have the image now of men in the distance squatting with a tail going from their bottoms to the ground.

We learned that they wiped their arses with the paper in their left hands and ate with their right.

Rebecca had never flown before and the journey from Heathrow to New Delhi was a good way of getting used to it. I don’t know how long the flight was but I remember eating, drinking, sleeping, eating again and still being in the air; the flight wasn’t very full and I appeared in the ‘in flight’ movie on that flight and also on the way back; an embarrassingly small role, I have to add, and nobody noticed me in the movie but they all saw my name in the end credits.

Stepping off the plane the heat and humidity hit our ankles even though it was April and dark. It was something like five in the morning UK time but we were raring to go.

We lived in Northampton at the time – maybe that was why my acting career was going south – and whenever we told anybody in India where we lived in England, their eyebrows would lift in confusion and then they would give that charming shake of the head we had seen at the High Commissioner’s Residence; they had never heard of Northampton so we would quickly add ‘sixty miles north of London.’

Even though it was late we needed to rise very early the following morning as an extra trip had been arranged; so at five fifteen I had my first Indian breakfast: masala omelette, toast and tea with hot milk.

Two Ambassador type cars picked us up at the front of our hotel and we were whisked off to Mrs Gandhi’s residence.

Yes we were going to meet the formidable Mrs ‘G’; her official residence seemed to be in a residential area, and we were led into a huge garden; there must have been two or three hundred other people there as there was some rule in India that anyone could show up to meet the Prime Minister; whether she actually met any of them I don’t know.

After the cold and dark of Britain, we were suddenly in a heat wave and hit by extreme brightness from the early morning sun; I had my white jacket on and even wore a tie; the local inhabitants wore very loose clothes, huge bell-bottom trousers or flairs and nearly all wore hats.

Parakeets and monkeys roamed freely as we followed a smiling official towards the main building; there didn’t seem to be a lot of noise but a kind of hum about the place accompanied by the whirls of cameras, the odd call from a human in the distance and then lots of squawking from the parakeets.

Over one side of the garden was a party of people huddled together; I got the impression that this was a whole organisation that had shown up to see the premier and not just their duly elected representatives.

We were shown into a kind of outer room and the others waiting in there seemed very nervous.

I suppose as an actor I had worked, and have worked since, with well known people; well known people in show business world, that is, not world leaders who go down in history; well known people so full of themselves, sometimes, that they are very unpleasant and sometimes when these well known people suddenly become unknown people it’s a bit of a relief.

After about five minutes or so we were called and led into another room; the room didn’t seem to have any aesthetic qualities at all, the furniture was functional: a sofa, an occasional table and a few chairs; behind the table was an open French window, which led to a quiet part of the garden, and another doorway was covered by a curtain.

When Mrs Gandhi entered she did the full theatrical bit through that curtain; she walked in as if she was the leader of the biggest democracy in the world, she walked in like a world leader, an important member of the Gandhi-Nehru dynasty and a figure of history.

She was accompanied by a few bodyguards; I have often thought about those body guards as it was her private bodyguard that turned and killed her eighteen months later in the grounds of that very building.

Everybody stood up when she entered and she sat down between the two girls on the sofa; Rebecca and the other fourteen year old girl.

Straight away it was obvious she was very comfortable with them; she started to chat informally but I noticed she didn’t have any small talk at all; she asked them about their essays, how they liked India – even though we had only been there eight hours - and would they ever consider coming back again; then she asked them where they lived; when it was Rebecca’s turn she said she lived in Northampton sixty miles north of London: “I know where Northampton is” Mrs Gandhi snapped “I was at Oxford.”

At one point I noticed Mrs Gandhi ring a bell she had secreted in her hand; through the curtain came somebody and before we could see them she asked them to get a photographer; this was the cue for us to stand behind her but it was also the cue for the bodyguards to push and shove each other to try and get into the shot.

I was standing at the end so didn’t think I had a chance of being included because when the photographer got ready to take the photo he seemed to aim it over to the other side of the room; but one of the body guards tried to get his face in to the shot and gave me a little push; I shoved gently back and in the subsequent photo he disappeared totally behind the person standing next to me; serves him right.

After the photo Mrs Gandhi shook hands with a couple of us and swept out as sweepingly as she had swept in.

I often think about those body guards.

Record four shows at once on a single DVR

Record four shows at once on a single DVR; for those not living in the USA, and looking at the stats it seems that’s the majority, that is a commercial put out here on television by AT&T.

AT&T is the big Kahuna of telephone companies here in the good old US of A; the equivalent of British Telecom in Britain and whatever the big Kahuna is in your country; the phone company who rent the lines out to all the others; the company who have the i-Phone as they were the only company who accepted it without changes from Apple.

It got me thinking as to who would want to record four shows at once on a single DV – not forgetting – the R. I can’t even begin to think of a situation where I would want to do such a thing; I mean what would I be doing whilst my DVD recorder records four shows from the TV shows available? And are there at least four shows anywhere on the networks, both terrestrial and extraterrestrial, worth recording?

But I guess people will fall for it and order the service from the Big Kahuna; they will be buying something they will very rarely use as we have all done.

I have just cancelled our cable service mainly because I didn’t use hardly any of the hundreds of TV channels available. All we watch is KCET which is the PBS in Los Angeles and Jeopardy, of course, on ABC.

I watch Jeopardy to exercise my Random Access Memory; RAM to computer guys. Us computer guys, I have to say, as we are all users (victims). If there are answers I don’t know I don’t mind but I have to answer the ones I do know before the contestant and as I seem to have collected a lot of useless information over the years I do it loads of times; I can’t answer questions on calculus or other math(s) problems and I must try to have a look at Greek Mythology one of the days.

I’ve always collected useless information without knowing it; for instance somebody asked me, the other day, who was the first test tube baby and I answered immediately Louise Brown – not very clever just there in my brain.

Another thing I have tried to do over the years is to remember as many people’s names as possible; David Frost was very good at it and look where it got him; it’s very disarming to meet someone famous and when you meet them again they’ve remembered your name.

I met the great comedian Les Dawson in a pub one time when I was working for ATV doing the soap Crossroads in Birmingham. I only did 13 episodes of it so I wasn’t really famous – even though people still come and mention it to me 39 years later. Two years later he came up to me in a pub (again) in Acton, London, and not only did he remember me from the pub, he remembered my first name; very impressive.

I was doing a film a few years ago, way before Frost and Nixon, and I mentioned to another actor, who was playing the leading role, the thing about David Frost being good at remembering names and he said “Who’s David Frost?” The film was called ‘Reeling in Reality’ but I’ve forgotten the other guy’s name!

Let’s get back to recording the four shows at once and people buying so many channels that they will never watch; isn’t it the same as all the people who buy a smart phone and never use any of the applications – or apps as they call them. By the way I went into a cafe the other day and instead of having ‘sides’ listed on the menu board they had put ‘apps.’

There I am (above) eating gumbo at the famous Farmer's Market here on 3rd Street with short hair.

Yesterday I was sitting at there at the Farmer’s Market looking at the amount of people staring at their smart phones.

Some of those people were writers and there was the odd actor and a few older people sitting around. There was a big man who is not right in the head who sometimes wears very funny hats – like a duck with a feather in it.

The place is full of characters like him getting their food from the various food stalls there; I buy my coffee at Bob’s Doughnuts, banter with the Latino girls who work there, practicing my Spanish, and indulge in the odd doughnut. And the creative people who have characters all around them to write about are staring into their phones as if they are crystal balls.

Twenty five years ago there was no such industry; between then and now a whole culture has built up and now we have many amateur photographers who think they are taking pictures like David Bailey or Ansell Adams and now they are using their ‘apps’ – or looking for them more than likely.

I had just returned from doing a little show at a residential home which I’ve been to before a couple of times. I usually sing them a few songs and sometimes they join in; the first time I went there I just sang some Irish songs and when I finished they shouted out " Hey! Where’s Danny Boy?"

I don’t really know it so I 'la la la’d' it and they seemed satisfied. Yesterday I sang a few more American ones and their favourite one was ‘All I Have to do is Dream’ which they sang along to; they know nothing about iPhones, cable stations or even what a DVR is – never mind recording 4 shows at once on a single DVR.

But I bet they would have loved to spend a day at 3rd Street at the Farmer’s Market – staring at the people staring at their smartphones!! Hey there's Bob's below.

Britain and the USA; the difference.

Have a look at that egg on toast above; succulent isn't it? The egg lies on that slice of toast waiting for the corner of another slice to be dipped into the yolk again and eaten; once in a while you might drip some of the yolk onto your chin and in that case you might want to take your knife and scrape it off and put it into your mouth; maybe scraping it onto your fork first.

My Grandad would eat the white of the egg and then put the yoke onto his knife and straight into his mouth. Some of it would go down his chin and he would do the inevitable thing with his knife; although not scraping it onto his fork first.

When I was working on the motorbikes all those many years ago there was a cafe on the corner of (I think) Winnie Road and Bristol Road South, in Birmingham, where I was introduced to egg on toast.

The egg is served on an uncut slice of hot buttered toast and then another slice of toast is cut in half and placed on either side of the plate. When you eat you dip the corners of the toast into the yolk and when all the yoke is eaten you eat the rest with your knife and fork.

And that is egg on toast - not an egg sandwich but egg on toast.

There are two kinds of egg sandwiches: one is a boiled egg sandwich and the other is a fried egg sandwich; with the boiled egg sandwich you boil the egg, peel it and mash it with salt and mayonnaise then put it between two slices of bread and butter; not toast!

With a fried egg sandwich you put the fried egg between two slices of bread without butter - not bloody toast.

Very hard to say that to an American waiter - bread NO TOAST!!

I know what you are asking - what has all this to do with the price of fish? - nothing.

So yesterday I went for my usual bike ride with my buddies along Venice Beach here in sunny old Los Angeles; it's a twelve mile jaunt and yesterday it was a bit heavy as there was a wind we had to ride into - it was exhilarating but I was glad when we finished.

We meet most weeks in the Fig Tree Cafe for breakfast and eat on the terrace outside; we have a view of the Pacific and the passing eccentric characters and the general wild people of Venice sporting their three hats (e.g.) at once; we hear the sounds of the lapping water and the rest of the terrace are privy to the sounds of us talking movies.

A couple of weeks ago, when I was eating my breakfast Quasadillas, I noticed that my friend Jim had ordered a couple of eggs - over easy. They looked really nice on his plate and I thought I would have some eggs - egg on toast - the next time which was yesterday.

Why did I bother to ask?

The time came to order; there is no egg on toast on the menu at the Fig tree so I had to ask for it specifically as follows:

'Can you put two eggs on top of a couple of slices of toast and do one extra slice of toast (so I could dip)?'

I thought that sounded quite simple and he didn't ask anything apart from how I'd like the eggs - 'over easy.'

Whilst waiting we chatted and drank our coffee for a while and eventually the food arrived; the Garden Omelette, Latkas and Eggs Benedict - but where was mine?

I looked around and then the waiter came over with a side plate of toast, cut in half, and a piece of foil wrapped butter. I put the butter between the two halves as it was frozen and I wanted to melt it so it would spread.

Then the waiter came back with my second slice of toast as before and as before I put the butter between the two halves again and said 'Where are the eggs?"

He went away and came back with yet another slice of toast as before and as before again I put the butter between the toast.

Then I had three side plates with a slice of toast on each; so I took the toast and put them all onto the one plate.

My friend Jim took a photo of it and here it is:



Next I went inside the cafe and enquired about my eggs - 'they're coming!'

A few minutes later the waiter brought the eggs on a plate so instead of having eggs on toast I had eggs on plate!!!

I asked the waiter what had happened and he told me that there are two different departments back there - one for the toast and one for the eggs!!!

Next week I'm going back to pancakes.

Earthquake and the shot heard round the range!!

Here in Southern California there is an earthquake industry; for instance a company specialises in a safety earthquake valve which automatically turns off the gas in your home in cases of earthquakes; we have the earthquake kit, carried in the car and at home we have the Moses box, tucked away in our wardrobe and other storage places with canned food and other supply essentials in case of an earthquake.

We see many television programmes telling us what to do in an earthquake and what to put in your emergency kit; up to about twelve months ago we were told that the best place to go in a quake would be to stand in a door frame but that has changed. The best place we are now told is under a table.

That may seem a bit silly to people who have never been in a quake and have only seen them on the movies, but it’s the most practical. In an earthquake you are more likely to get hurt or even killed by a can of beans flying across the room or your television crashing into you than falling down a crack in the road.

So our communal heart attack came yesterday in the form of an earthquake; the epicentre was a few hundred miles away in Baja but we certainly felt it here.

It was 7.2 on the Richter scale which is much bigger than the 7.0 quake in Haiti – a lot bigger as it get exponentially bigger the higher you go on the scale which is a logarithmic scale, meaning that the numbers on the scale measure factors of 10. So, for example, an earthquake that measures 4.0 on the Richter scale is 10 times larger than one that measures 3.0 and so on.

I think I read that the Chile quake at 8.8 was something like 5,000 times bigger than the Haiti quake.

An earthquake is a huge adrenalin rush; you don’t know how long it’s going to last, how serious it’s going to be or even if this is your last moment on earth.

I was adding a bass line to a song I was recording a couple of years ago when one came. I was doing this at home as I do all my recordings here; I have a limited musical talent but I can play a few instruments up to a mediocre standard and in any case I can’t afford to hire musicians so I play all the instruments myself. By the way it’s great fun.

As I was recording in the morning I hadn’t bothered to get dressed before starting work – in fact most of the time I write wearing my dressing gown – and when the quake started I was just wearing shorts with nothing on my feet.

When the quake stopped I had visions of being rescued in my underpants if it had been bigger so from then on, for a little while anyway, I was up and dressed before starting work.

Yesterday’s quake was different; I was at the market. Once a month I take a day off from being an actor, or a writer or even organising my show in Edinburgh and sell at Fairfax High School Outdoor Flea Market; it goes a long way towards our rent but it’s a great atmosphere and great fun.

I was sitting behind my stall when I felt the first shake – yes the earth moving – and of course you are never sure if it is, in fact, moving or if you’re dizzy or even imagining things but the shake got bigger and bigger till I was sure. I looked around and heard the word ‘quake’ from the girl in the stall next to me and then the guy from the stall the other side of me said ‘did you feel that?’ and the girl said ‘it’s still happening.’ Which, indeed, it was!

I looked around and all the people that had been walking and talking a moment earlier were standing still; not a word was spoken and the market place was completely silent. The shaking was still shaking, the adrenalin was going higher, the silence was quieter and suddenly it stopped. It seemed like half an hour but in truth was a matter of minutes and then everybody started to move again and talk.

At that precise moment we didn’t know whether the rest of Southern California had been completely obliterated from the face of the earth or what had happened. A few figures were banded about – 7.2, 6.5 – from some of the experts there and then we called our loved ones to see if they were all right.

I called my wife who had gone to Starbucks for a frappuccino at the Hollywood/Highland Centre where the eyes of the world were focused a few weeks ago on the Academy Awards; she said she wasn’t sure she felt the shaking – she wondered what it was – but she was ok. As a rule you don’t feel much if you are walking or driving.

It kind of reminded me of something that happened to me many years ago when I was in the army cadets.

I wrote of my experience in the SAS a few weeks ago and the reason I was quite good at being a soldier when I joined was that I was in the army cadets for four years beforehand. I was good at marching, playing the drum, shooting, map reading and all the rest of the stuff and at the age of sixteen I was teaching map reading, battlefield tactics, weapon training and even the military drum.

After a couple of years I passed all the exams and tests and I was promoted to sergeant.

I taught the little fellas the first thing about a Bren gun that the tiniest part had the longest name – the Body Locking Nut Retainer Plunger – and how to take the thing apart in less than half a minute and in map reading I would tell them what a map is; a piece of land drawn to scale on a piece of paper or parchment.

We would go to the range and fire the .303 Lee Enfield rifle; it weighed ten pounds and when you fired it the rifle would give you an almighty kick in the shoulder if you didn’t hold it properly; I’ve seen many a bruised shoulder and sometimes a black eye when it wasn’t held properly.

At the range we would be split into two groups; those that did the firing and those that did the scoring.

When you fired the rifle it made a hug noise and the firing line always created the most god awful din that you could imagine. The one thing you were not allowed to wear on the range was ear plugs and it was a wonder we didn’t all go deaf. The reason for this is that we needed to hear orders.

The real scary part was the scoring; the scorers had to go to a place called the butts. This was a place dug into the ground beneath the targets. There was a bench to sit on and there were two targets at each post; when one target was up you pulled the other one down on a pulley system.

When a bullet hit the target the scorer would mark where on the target the bullet had hit. We would do this with a marker on a long stick with a board attached to the top. If a firer hit the bull we would show the white side and touch the target in the top left hand corner and then touch the bull. There were four rings on the target; bull, inner, outer and magpie. We touched another corner for the inner showing the dark side of the marker and so on.

The reason why it was so scary is that we could see the bullets landing behind the targets in the sandy hill and it was like being fired at; with that and the sound of ricochets and banging from the firing line it was like being at war; we had to yell at each other to be heard and when the firing stopped we had to paste up the holes in the target. The bull’s eye was two tones – black and white – and the idea was to aim at the corner of the bull to make a good group.

After we pasted over where the bullets had hit the target off it would go again.

One day the heart attack or the earthquake for that day happened; the kid next to me, John Bethal, suddenly shouted out “Fuck me – I’ve been shot!”

I turned around and he had his hand over his forehead with blood pouring down his arms and onto the floor.

I don’t know who did it but someone called the firing line and told the officer in charge - a Lt Leonard - who covered the 100 yards from the line to the butts in one second flat – or that’s what it seemed like.

What had happened was a bullet had hit the bank behind the targets, ricocheted back and scraped across John’s hairline – figuratively parting his hair!!

When the Lieutenant arrived he sorted everything out and they carried John away for treatment; he eventually turned out to be okay and there was a lot of talk as to whether it was an actual bullet or a piece of grit but it was generally considered a bullet as the sand was quite soft – but you never know.

Another cadet, who was very posh, sat in John’s seat and said “Lightening never strikes in the same place twice.”