My first posting in the Royal Air Force was RAF Marham, in 1980 to 1981, straight from trade training. Like many first postings, it came as a bit of a shock.

I arrived full of whatever confidence survives trade training, only to discover I had been permanently put into the transit block. This, I was quickly informed, was reputed to be the worst accommodation block in the RAF. I never found any reason to doubt it. It was a dreadful place. Rough, miserable, and barely fit for purpose. To make matters worse, we were getting weekly bull nights, so it felt only a small step up from basic training, and not always even that.

At first I thought I had landed in hell.

Then I met the two lads I was sharing with, Jock Riley, who was a fireman, and Mark, who was a supplier. To my young eyes they were both impossibly cool. The sort of blokes who seemed to know exactly how the RAF worked, how life worked, and how to enjoy both. If I am honest, I was a bit scared of them to begin with. I was still fresh out of training and probably looked it. But they turned out to be great company, and we had some cracking times together.

Eventually common sense prevailed and I was moved into spare married quarters, because the transit block really was not fit to house anybody. But before I escaped, it left me with one memory that has never gone away.

One night I had been out down the pub and, for reasons that completely escape me now, I decided tequila chasers were a good idea. At the time this seemed clever. By the end of the evening it was clear that it was not. On the way back we stopped for a Chinese, which in hindsight was not exactly a masterstroke either.

By the time I got back to the block the world was spinning and I knew I was in trouble. I ran off to the toilets in a hurry, only to find all the lights were broken. No matter, I thought. I rushed into a cubicle, aimed roughly in the direction of the pan, and was violently sick. Feeling a good deal better afterwards, and rather pleased with my own crisis management, I went back to bed.

The following morning I was rudely awakened by what felt like an official delegation. I was marched back to the toilet block to inspect the scene of the crime.

It turns out that if you are going to be sick into a toilet, it does help to lift the lid first.

That was a lesson I learned the hard way, in darkness, after tequila, with witnesses. I have never touched tequila since, and with good reason.

Another strong memory from Marham was the regular trips to Norwich with Julian Hathaway. We used to head over to a place called the Star Bar, which brewed its own beer. It was superb stuff, and the interesting thing was that it never seemed to be quite the same two nights running. That probably added to the charm, though it may also explain a few things.

We would settle in there and get completely pie eyed, as young airmen with more enthusiasm than sense often did. Being responsible and irresponsible in equal measure, we then went back to the car and slept it off before driving home. In our minds this was the height of practical planning. Looking back, it was probably just another example of the casual madness of being young and thinking yourself indestructible.

If either of us needed to be sick during the night, the drill was simple. Open car door, lean out, deposit stomach contents onto the ground, shut door, carry on. No drama, no fuss, no dignity.

We were both into the very early illegal CB radio scene as well, so that added another layer of nonsense to the whole thing. Instead of just sleeping, we would spend half the night on the CB, no doubt sounding like two drunken idiots to anyone unlucky enough to be listening. At the time, of course, we probably thought we were absolutely fascinating.

It is funny what stays with you. Not the grand occasions, not the polished parade-ground moments, but the daft little episodes. Driving to Norwich for beer that changed from night to night, sleeping in a car so we could sober up, hanging out of the doors to be sick, and rambling nonsense over illegal CB radios. Completely ridiculous. Completely unsafe by modern standards. Completely unforgettable.

My other strong memory of Marham was during the building works for the hardened aircraft shelters, in preparation for the Tornados coming. One weekend, my mate Phil Taylor and I were on TANSOR readiness. Phil was a qualified driver. I was not. That did not stop him taking me out onto the airfield from time to time to let me have a bit of practice anyway, which seemed like an excellent idea at the time.

So there we were, with not much going on, springing about the airfield in a Land Rover while I was behind the wheel pretending I knew what I was doing.

As it turned out, I did not.

At one point I drove straight into a newly concreted taxiway. Not just damp concrete. Proper freshly laid stuff, probably about a foot deep. The Land Rover went into it and concrete went absolutely everywhere, including right across the windscreen. For a moment there was that awful silence where you know you have done something spectacularly stupid, but your brain has not yet caught up with quite how stupid.

Somehow, with more hope than skill, I managed to get us out of it and back to the tower. We then did what young men in uniform have done since time began. We tried to make the evidence disappear.

To be fair, we did not do a bad job. We cleaned the Land Rover up, got rid of every obvious trace we could find, and when we were stood down we handed it back to MT looking, to our eyes at least, entirely respectable.

We were quite pleased with ourselves.

That feeling lasted until the next morning.

It turned out we had cleaned the vehicle beautifully, apart from one small detail. We had entirely forgotten about the engine bay, which was now comprehensively decorated with hardened concrete. So while the outside looked spotless, lifting the bonnet revealed the sort of scene that rather gave the game away.

The next day all hell broke loose.

You can imagine the trouble we got into.

Looking back now, it was idiotic. At the time it felt like just another bit of bored weekend inventiveness between two young blokes with more confidence than judgement. But that is often how the best service memories are made. Not the official moments, but the daft ones. The ones where you know full well you should not laugh, but after enough years have passed, that is exactly what you do.

So when I think of RAF Marham, I do not only think of aircraft, towers and station life. I think of the worst accommodation block in the RAF, two roommates who turned out to be top lads, tequila in a dark toilet block, nights in Norwich at the Star Bar, sleeping in cars and talking nonsense over illegal CB, and one utterly doomed attempt to hide a Land Rover’s close encounter with a freshly poured taxiway.

It was a rough, funny, chaotic start to RAF life.

And I remember it very fondly.