Marking Time

I spent nearly my first year in Northern Ireland doing nothing. Well doing nothing might be a small exaggeration - we trained, stagged on, went out, miserably failed to get into any decent nightclubs, and spent the occasional week or two back in Blighty. Repeat the above ad nauseum and you have my life for a year. After a while I even removed the "failing to get into any decent nightclubs" from the schedule - I just stopped going out. At the time things seemed to go by so slowly - we weren't doing what we had trained, and continued to train, to do. No one was getting blown up, shot and even the knee-cappings were down. In a sick sort of way many of us wished for an end to the ceasefire - we wanted some action. We should have remembered the saying - "Be careful of what you wish for."