Armagh, 25th March 2004

…feeling the pinch….short of money..?

Why not move to South Armagh and use one of the 51 border crossing points conveniently placed not 5 miles from your doorstop to smuggle any commodity you wish into the United Kingdom. Guaranteed to make you at least a million pounds a year for sitting on your fat ass six days a week. What is more the police and army will watch you do it and make sure nobody robs your house whilst your out making your ill gotten gains.

Aaah the honest life of the South Armagh tenant farmer: a few pigs, some friendly sheep and a industrial fuel processing plant in your kitchen. Everybody here is way too busy counting the cash to bother their ass with anything quite so energetic as killing soldiers these days. Which is a shame as without them trying to kill us there is absolutely fuck all reason for us to be here- unless of course getting massive in the gym is now a central pillar of our Tonee’s foreign policy- probably a more sensible one than his ‘ethical’ one. Unfortunately though the military in South Armagh are now a bargaining tool caught up in the whole painfully drawn out ‘non war’ process, so judging by the speed of progress we could be here for some time to come. I’m sure in years to come the simile ‘like pulling teeth’ will be replaced by ‘like getting Adams and Paisley to agree on anything more controversial than the day of the week’. If only we could have done a Bush and declared victory, flogged off all the mineral resources and hived off the security to private companies owned by our mates we would have been out in 69.

Anyway enough bitching about something way above my pay scale, I will stick to commanding the private phone (with outside line) in my room. Thankfully- as you buggers never phone it - it never answers back, although often in desperation I just pick it up on the off chance that there is somebody out there. Just in case you do ever have a really bad day at work and feel the urge to insult somebody give me a call - if somebody with a thick Irish accent answers you’ve got the wrong number- if somebody claims to have never heard of me before- ignore them- it’ll mean that I’ve been out of the room for 30 minutes and one of the boys has forgotten I ever existed.

I know you’ve all been on tender hooks and could not sleep for wondering so here are this weeks stats:

hours spent outside- less than 1
money spent- less than £10
fun had- incalculable

Last weekend I just happened to be loitering outside the sauna (old habits die hard…although when aged 11 at the local leisure centre you could never quite guess which nubile young thing might emerge, unfortunately here you know exactly what type of thing will splutter forth) when I caught sight of the obligatory army health and safety message (in the crazy world of the MOD even bullets carry their own individual hazard ‘warning this item is liable to kill if placed the right way in the rifle’- so with me you’ve at least got a 50% chance of surviving). Thankfully on the sauna some conscientious civil servant had taken the time to warn me not to:

a. shave in the sauna (thank god he told me)

b. do physical exercise in the sauna (because exercise isn’t painful enough in the air-conditioned gym I thought I might start moving the rowing machine, the peck deck and some exceptional heavy dumbbells into the sauna)

c. engage in sexual activities in the gym (hopefully - in a base full of blokes - unlikely; although a particularly good usage of the word ‘engage’- in the pamphlet of infantry tactics the job description of the infantry has just changed from ‘to close with, and kill the enemy’ to ‘engage the enemy’ - so, in the corridors of Whitehall, ‘engage’ is obviously the new buzz word, to be applied to both loving and fighting)

And before any of you tight fisted tax payers start complaining about the luxuries the gov’t is lavishing upon us pampered boys, I didn’t feel the need to go into the sauna as my windowless box of a cell replicates that millionaire feeling 16 hours a day. My only hope is early release for good behaviour.

Right must dash, one of the locals is off smuggling and he’s asked me to watch his house whilst he’s away.

You all take it easy out there.