If I’m honest, this whole journey very nearly didn’t start when it should have.
In 2024, a charity called PCaSO came to Cosham Masonic Hall to run a prostate cancer testing day. One of those sensible opportunities that you know you should take. I even booked myself in. Then, as the day got closer, I started overthinking something completely trivial, traffic. Getting in, getting out, the usual nonsense. So I cancelled.
I wish I hadn’t.
The following year they were back again, same place, same setup. This time I booked in and made a quiet decision that I wasn’t going to talk myself out of it again. When the day came, it turned out I’d been worrying about absolutely nothing. It was organised with military precision, in and out with no fuss at all. The only delay was me being a poor pin cushion, it took two nurses five attempts to get blood out of me, so I left looking like I’d been in a minor skirmish.
Then came the waiting.
About ten days later, a letter dropped through the door. It had red writing on it, which is never a great sign. Inside was a number: 9.5. For context, that’s roughly three times higher than it ought to be. That was the moment things started to feel a bit more real.
I rang the GP straight away. They were calm, almost dismissive at first, saying these things can happen and are often nothing to worry about. Sensible enough, but they booked me in for a repeat blood test and a DRE just to be sure. The DRE, which most men spend far too much time worrying about, turned out to be quick, professional, and over before you’ve really had time to think about it.
Another blood test followed, and more waiting. This time only five days.
The call came back with a second result: 9.6.
That got their attention.
The tone changed, and I was referred to Urology on the two-week pathway. And just like that, what had started as a simple check turned into something a bit more serious.
We left things with Andrea asking me to marry her.
By email.
I should point out, I was in the room next door at the time.
That probably tells you everything you need to know about how we worked.
A few days later we went over to Chichester to choose a ring. When the correctly sized ring came in, Andrea didn’t hang about. She was straight in the car and back off to Chichester to collect it.
Now, if I’m being completely honest, I wasn’t in a rush to get married. Not because I had doubts. Quite the opposite. Life had been good to me. I’d had an interesting run, some of it down to hard work, some of it just good fortune. I wasn’t in any hurry to change things too quickly.
Around that time, I used to dabble in the TV-AM morning telephone quiz. Nothing serious, just the odd call here and there.
One particular morning I’d entered again, but had to get into work early for some reason, so I didn’t think much more about it.
Then the phone rang.
It was Andrea, sounding far more excited than usual, telling me I’d won the TV-AM quiz.
Now, there are quite a few Mike Smiths in the world, so I assumed she’d got the wrong end of the stick. I carried on with my day.
A bit later, the phone rang again.
This time it was TV-AM.
Turns out, I had actually won.
The prize was two weeks in Florida. One week in Disney, one week in Clearwater, and a thousand pounds spending money thrown in for good measure.
At that point, the decision about when to get married became a lot simpler.
I picked a date.
We took my mum and Andrea’s son, Scott, with us on what became the trip of a lifetime.
My mum had recently had heart bypass surgery, but you wouldn’t have known it. She still did all the rides at Disney and threw herself into the whole thing. We had a brilliant time.
Then we drove down to Clearwater, which is definitely one of the best beaches in the United States. We met the wedding planner, who basically said, “Leave it to me.”
So we did.
Then came the practical bits. Wedding dress, suits, and all the things you suddenly realise you need when you’ve decided to get married in Florida.
My mum bought Andrea’s wedding dress. All $99 of it.
And it looked lovely.
The suits were sorted, everything was ready, and I did what any sensible groom would do. I prepared myself in the bar the day before and had a great time.
Then the wedding day arrived.
The weather was awful. Andrea had her hair done, also awfully, which didn’t help matters.
But as the afternoon came, the clouds cleared, the sun came out, and good weather shone on us once more.
And there, on the beach at Clearwater, Andrea and I got married.
The wedding itself was wonderful. Simple, warm, and exactly right for us.
That evening, we went on a river cruise with dancing, and it was fantastic. One of those evenings that stays with you forever.
A lucky competition entry had somehow turned into Disney, Clearwater, a beach wedding, and memories that Andrea and I would carry for the rest of our lives.
Moving into the new centre dragged on for months. One week it was happening, the next it wasn’t. In the meantime, we were working in what felt like a building site.
Most of the equipment hadn’t been installed, and the raised floor was still up in sections for cabling. For the first six months, just getting around the office felt like a game of hopscotch, stepping over gaps and trying not to disappear into the void.
Eventually, we did move in properly.
The first person I met there was Andrea. She was issuing security passes. I remember thinking she was a very attractive woman, but she was a bit distant, not unfriendly, just not giving much away. I left it at that.
A year or so later, she’d moved into a facilities role and started coming up to the fourth floor regularly to see Steve. By then, it was obvious she knew exactly how to handle a room full of men. Confident, playful, and more than capable of getting what she needed without much resistance.
She’d occasionally stop for a quick word with me, but not often. Truth be told, I didn’t have much she needed.
I used to sit opposite Sheila, the Project Director’s PA. We got on very well, and I probably talked far too much about the fact that I thought Andrea was rather special. After hearing this one too many times, Sheila eventually had enough.
It was just before Valentine’s Day when she said, “Why don’t you stop talking about it and just ask her out?”
Fair point.
So I did. I sent Andrea a note, and we met in the stairwell like a couple of teenagers avoiding being seen. We arranged to go out for a meal at a Chinese restaurant near where she lived.
There had been an earlier attempt at something resembling a date, though that didn’t go well. I’d made the tactical error of bringing Steve along, which resulted in Andrea quite understandably focusing her attention on him. I made a quiet exit from that one.
Valentine’s Day was different.
I picked her up from her house, and from the moment we got talking properly, everything just clicked. Conversation was easy, the sort where you forget about time and everything else going on around you.
From my point of view, we got on like a house on fire.
Andrea might tell that part slightly differently, of course.
The next day, I arrived at my desk to find a slice or two of angel cake waiting for me.
That, naturally, got the girls talking.
“Who is Angel Cake then?”
Sheila, bless her, was brilliant. She knew exactly what was going on, but kept the secret.
For a while, Andrea and I kept things quiet. We would meet at the nature reserve car park before I drove back to London, just for a quick snog and a few stolen minutes together. It all felt slightly ridiculous, but also wonderfully exciting.
After about a year of secretive dates, we went to a Christmas party at TGI’s, which had become the project team’s favourite night out. It was a great evening, and eventually I made my excuses because I had to drive back to London. Andrea made some excuse of her own, and we met outside in the car park.
We were having a long snog when one of the team walked out and caught us.
That was it. Cover blown.
He went straight back inside and spilled the beans. There was no hiding it after that, so we simply became a normal-ish couple, although the London problem was always there. I still had to keep driving back.
Andrea had been having problems with her ankle for ages after falling down a pothole in a car park. Eventually, she got a date for surgery and asked if I would stay with her afterwards to help her get about safely.
Naturally, I was only too happy to assist.
In fact, I only went back to London to give up my flat and move in with Andrea properly.
Then one day, I was sitting at the computer when an email arrived in my inbox.
The next chapter in my career came with the New En-Route Centre, better known as NERC.
On paper, it sounded like the opportunity. Big programme. National importance. Cutting-edge systems. In reality, it was already two years late before we even arrived.
Three of us were sent down into the depths of Hampshire to help move things along. Myself, Steve Loble, and Dave “Ratty” Roden. The plan was simple enough: embed with IBM and add some much-needed momentum.
There was just one small problem.
IBM didn’t really want us there.
IBM North Harbour was enormous in those days. Thousands of people, all busy, all with their own priorities. And then there were three outsiders dropped into the middle of it, with no clear role and no real welcome.
It made for an odd routine.
We’d turn up in the morning, grab a coffee, flick through a few manuals, and then quietly disappear. By midday, we’d usually be in a different Hampshire pub, conducting what became an unofficial but very thorough review process.
Beer, food, and atmosphere. All scored out of ten.
We took it seriously.
By about three in the afternoon, we’d wander back into the office just long enough to be seen, then head home. For me, that meant the drive back up to London.
And then repeat.
Day after day.
We did that for nine months.
Looking back, it sounds ridiculous. At the time, it was worse. There’s only so long you can be paid to exist before it starts to grind you down. You want to contribute. You want to be useful. Sitting on the sidelines does something to your confidence if you let it.
Eventually, things shifted.
Dave headed back to London. I can’t recall exactly what Steve moved on to, but for me, the break came when I was made Performance Work Package Manager.
That changed everything.
The performance team were the first systems group to move into the brand-new NERC building. Purpose-built, modern, and full of promise. Suddenly I was in the middle of it, working alongside IBM and Loral engineers, trying to get a grip on how the system would actually behave under load.
There was just one catch.
Most of the kit wasn’t there yet.
The building was ready. The people were there. But the equipment was still being installed. So instead of testing real systems, we spent our time building theoretical models, trying to predict performance before we had anything solid to measure.
It felt like progress, but only just.
The strange thing about that period is that some of the best laughs of my working life came during one of the most difficult projects I ever worked on. I can’t remember every name in the team now, but there were about five of us in that office, and we laughed a lot.
Proper laughter.
The sort that gets you through long days, impossible problems, and the creeping suspicion that the whole thing might never actually work.
But it was serious work too.
After about a year, we finally had the systems in place. That should have felt like a major step forward. In one sense, it was. The equipment existed. The software was there. The pieces were beginning to look like a real operational system.
There was just one problem.
The performance was nowhere near good enough.
Not a bit short.
Miles off.
So began another long period of head scratching, investigation, tuning, argument, testing, and retesting. Another year slipped by. By then, the project was four years late.
Eventually, most of the big system issues were resolved, but that only took us to the next problem. Having a system is one thing. Being able to support it safely, reliably, and professionally in live operation is something else entirely.
Steve was asked to lead the work on the support infrastructure, and he picked me to help him.
That became a huge piece of work. We had to design the support processes, test them, prove they worked, and make sure we had a properly trained team ready to use them. It was not glamorous work, but it mattered.
In air traffic control, clever engineering is not enough.
You need discipline, process, evidence, and people who know exactly what to do when something goes wrong.
Then we had to prove all of that to NATS.
By this stage, Steve was burnt out. He had carried a lot for a long time, and eventually I was tasked with leading the support organisation.
And then, finally, six years late, NERC went live.
For all the pain, delay, frustration, and sheer bloody effort, we did it.
In my view, and I know many others felt the same, NERC became the best, most resilient, and best-supported air traffic control system in the world.
I learnt more on that project than I was ever likely to learn again. Systems, performance, support, resilience, people, pressure, politics, failure, recovery, and persistence. It was all there.
Looking back, it was a privilege.
A difficult, exhausting, maddening privilege.
But a privilege all the same.
We had helped birth that baby, and against the odds, it flew.
I left the RAF on £8,500 a year and took a job in West London on £13,500. On paper, that looked like a decent pay rise. Then I started looking for somewhere to live and quickly found out that £13.5k did not go very far at all.
To make matters worse, I got clobbered by emergency tax because, as usual, the RAF could not manage civil paperwork properly. I ended up renting a room in a house on the Britwell estate in Langley. Anyone who knows the area will know it was not exactly the most desirable place to land. Then there was the rail season ticket on top. By that point I was already drowning in debt and had not even bought any food yet.
For three months I was on emergency tax and lived on beans on toast the whole time.
On my first day working for the CAA, I met my boss for the first and only time. He told me I would be working on NAS Monitor with Martin Hutchings. The strange thing was that I had joined to work in Ross’s Flight Data Processing team, because that was the world I actually knew.
NAS Monitor was, and probably still is, the blackest of black arts. It was basically the operating system behind an air traffic control system. Completely the wrong place to put me, really. I was not much of an engineer in the true sense. I was an ATC man who understood operations.
Still, life throws things at you and sometimes you just have to get on with it.
Martin was a complete brain box, the absolute opposite of me in many ways, but I learned a huge amount from him and I learned it fast.
My writing was Martin’s first challenge. It simply was not accurate enough for engineering. He was very good at waving his red pen around, and plenty of what I produced came back covered in corrections. But I learned.
Bit by bit I became far more methodical. Learning how to write accurate tests properly did two things. First, it improved my writing. Second, it forced me to understand the system in real detail. Once you can describe exactly what a system should do, and exactly how it has gone wrong, you are already halfway to understanding it properly.
That, in turn, meant I could write PTRs, Program Trouble Reports, in proper detail. Within a year I had raised more PTRs than anyone else in the department.
The next problem was that working on NAS Monitor meant working on the live system. That, in turn, meant doing much of the work in the early hours of the morning, when there was the least operational risk.
Getting a train in for a 10pm start was bad enough. Getting one home at 3am was worse. In the end, on those nights, I would often just sleep in the office.
It was all slowly killing me, or at least that is what it felt like at the time. I was skint, exhausted, living badly, and working ridiculous hours. But there was an upside. Very quickly, I was becoming one of the very few real NAS experts in the world.
I had the perfect teacher and the hunger to learn.
After three years of doing that, I decided I was starting to get stale. I was no longer really learning anything new, and that is always a dangerous place to be. Once you stop learning, you are just repeating yourself.
At that point there was a new project in town, one that was going to replace the whole lot. That sounded exactly like the place I ought to be, so I volunteered to move across.
My final posting, after Cowden, was RAF Waddington, and into the tower at last.
The seed for that had actually been planted while I was still at Cowden. We had been called by a controller at Waddington to deconflict some traffic, and I recognised the voice straight away. It was Squadron Leader Mike Reep, one of the supervisors from West Drayton and a proper chap. I soon found out he was now the SATCO at Waddington, so that seemed as good an excuse as any to put Waddington down as my preferred final posting. I was very pleased when the RAF agreed.
Not long before I was due to arrive, I found out Waddington was closed for runway resurfacing, so everyone was operating from Coningsby instead. That suited me well enough because one of my long-time friends, Jim Mackenzie, was there. It was good fun working at Coningsby, but if I am honest, it was even better when Waddington finally reopened and we could get back to where we belonged.
One of the first jobs was sending the AEW Nimrods down to Abingdon to be broken up. That was a bit hairy because some of them had not flown for years, and nobody quite knew how gracefully they would take to the sky again. By then I was very experienced and found the job straightforward enough, but if I am honest it no longer really stretched me. I could do it, and do it well, but the challenge had gone.
I also knew my RAF career had probably reached its ceiling. Promotion was never likely. As you have probably gathered by now, I had been just a little too naughty over the years to look like ideal promotion material.
So I got in touch with Ross Williams, one of the chaps I had worked with in DYSIM, who had recently joined the CAA, still in that world. I asked if there were any jobs going. There were. I applied, got accepted, and did so well ahead of my RAF termination date. That meant I could take my last nine months fairly easily, with the next chapter already in sight, and I thoroughly enjoyed those final months in uniform.
Then came my last day in the tower.
After saying goodbye to everyone, I took my final call in the tower, booking in a practice diversion for an F111. A few hours later, as the bus was just pulling out of Waddington for the last time, I looked across and saw that same aircraft carrying out its PD. You could not script a better ending. A very fitting final scene to a brilliant time in the Royal Air Force.
After Saxa Vord came my next posting, RAF West Drayton.
They always say that when you leave Saxa Vord you get a choice of posting. In reality, as ever with the RAF, the choice was never quite as real as it sounded. I had chosen Prestwick. I got West Drayton. Not exactly what I had picked, but near enough in the type of work, so I was not about to complain too much.
I was posted into MASOR, the Military Air Space Operations Room, the place where most military flights across England and Wales were controlled from. That alone made it a serious and exciting posting, the sort of place where things mattered and where the pace never really let up.
But the real magic for me was next door.
Right alongside MASOR was CASOR, the Civil Air Space Operations Room, the place I had dreamed about ever since that unforgettable bollocking in Aldergrove Control Tower all those years before. Back then I had been a kid in trouble, but all I could really think about was how amazing the place looked and how badly I wanted to be part of that world one day.
Now here I was.
In air traffic control terms, there probably was not a more exciting place to work. It felt like the centre of everything. Busy, important, alive. For me it was more than just another posting. It was the place I had wanted for years, the place that had lived in my imagination ever since I first looked into that tower as a boy. I do not think I can properly explain just how lucky I felt to be there. I knew it at the time and I still know it now. I was so lucky.
It turned out I was pretty good at the job.
I had been screened by SAC Mick Peaple, a lovely bloke and bloody clever with it. He clearly saw something in me, and I have never forgotten that. Life has a funny way of going round in circles because many years later I was able to give Mick a job at NATS, testing software. I was really pleased to do that. Sadly, Mick passed away from prostate cancer eight to ten years ago, which felt desperately unfair for such a good man.
After a few years on the ops floor, I started to think a bit further ahead. Much as I loved the live job, I could see that systems and software might give me a longer future. That led me to DYSIM, Dynamic Simulation, which at the time felt like a real breakthrough in the training of controllers.
It was a cracking role. You needed a bit of technical knowledge because the simulation had to work properly, but you also needed a bit of acting in you as well. You were helping create realistic situations, believable traffic, proper pressure, and the kind of problems controllers would really have to handle. It was not enough for the system to run. It had to feel real. We got good at it, and before long we were very well thought of by the training section.
DYSIM ran on the main computer system that sat close to the centre of UK airspace operations, which in hindsight meant we were rather nearer the beating heart of the whole business than was probably wise for a group of young men who fancied an early finish on a Friday.
By then we knew the system well. In fact, we knew it a bit too well. Well enough to know how to make it fall over and cause a fair bit of disruption.
So on the odd Friday afternoon, when the temptation of an early getaway got the better of us, we knew exactly how to break it. At the time, of course, we did not really think through the consequences. We just thought we were being clever. Looking back, it was daft, and a bit more serious than we cared to admit.
What I enjoy now is the neat circle of it all. Years later, when I became Chief Engineer at NATS, part of my job was making sure systems were resilient, robust, and protected against exactly that sort of thing. So there I was, helping make critical systems stronger against the kind of young idiot I had once been.
That is life, really. Sometimes you spend your youth seeing how far you can push things, then spend the rest of your career making sure nobody else can do the same.
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.
There are some postings you forget almost as soon as you leave them. RAF Cowden was not one of them.
I was posted there from 1986 to 1988, and looking back now it was one of the strangest, most enjoyable and most memorable places I ever served. It was not a big station with endless people, parades and fuss. In truth, it was a very small camp, tucked away in pleasant farmland, with the beach only about a mile away and the North Sea always making its presence felt.
What made Cowden unusual was the contrast. On the one hand, it was one of the best places I ever stayed. The domestic block was purpose-built, a two-storey L-shaped building with the upper floor more dormer than full storey. We had single rooms, which was a rarity in those days. The food was second to none, mainly because the chef was only really cooking for four of us who lived in. We even had our own bar, which we ran ourselves. With office staff and civilian workers maintaining the targets, there were about sixteen people on the camp altogether, but only four of us actually lived there. That gave the place a very close-knit feel. Small enough that everyone knew everyone, and comfortable enough that you could forget for a moment what sort of place it really was.
Because Cowden was not just a pleasant little camp near the coast. It was a busy working air weapons range.
In the late 1980s the main traffic was Tornado GR1s, F-111s and A-10s. We had the occasional Jaguar and Harrier, but the USAF was really our meat and potatoes. They were not based on site, but they were the backbone of much of the flying we saw. Every now and then the USAF would send a pilot up to see us and go through the scoring. Curiously enough, they always seemed to have done rather well when they came back to look at the results.
Bomb scoring was a serious business. It was done by triangulation using scopes, intercom and a computer. The basic maths behind it was not especially complicated, a bit of Pythagoras and a database to hold the results, but in practice it had to work properly when things got busy. I ended up developing changes to the computer to make it more usable in heavy periods, and I was later seconded to Strike Command to help with development work on a new version of the system. In the end, I never saw that come to fruition, which is probably a fairly familiar story to anyone who has ever tried to improve anything in a large organisation. Still, for a while at least, it felt good to be helping make the system better. At the end of each week the results were sent out to the various squadrons, so what we did on that little camp mattered.
The range itself is still very clear in my mind. Target 7 was the furthest out to sea, around a mile and a half, a metallic raft about thirty feet square, mainly used by F-111s and Tornados. Target 6 was much closer in, about a quarter of a mile offshore, and was a circle of barrels with a small raft in the middle, though it was not used very often. Target 3 sat to the left of the tower, a circle of barrels with a cluster in the middle. Target 4 was to the right of the tower, built much the same way, and was mainly used by A-10s. Then there were the strafe pits, to the left of Target 4 and nearest the tower, also mainly used by A-10s.
And that brings me to the tower.
The tower was not somewhere you relaxed. It had a radio room and a toilet at the bottom, stairs up to the control room at the top, and a balcony running around it. From up there the view was magnificent. Straight out to sea, with Flamborough Head to the left and the Humber estuary to the right. On a clear day it was a lovely place to look out from. But it also had an edge to it that you did not forget. The tower was close to the strafe pits, about 250 metres away, and you could regularly hear ricochets flying past. That certainly sharpened the senses. It was also vulnerable in another way. The tower stood about 300 feet from the cliff edge, and one morning we came in to find that roughly 150 feet of cliff had disappeared overnight. That gives you a fair idea of what the Holderness coast was like. Beautiful to look at, but always on the move and always taking bites out of the land.
If there had been a fire in the tower, the evacuation plan was not exactly luxurious either. You got out by jumping off the balcony wearing a rope harness that slowed your fall. Perfectly sensible in a practical RAF sort of way, but it sounds mad when you say it out loud now.
The weather was usually standard British weather, nothing especially dramatic most of the time, but every so often we would get sea fog. When it came in, it really came in. One summer it stayed for two weeks. We could not see a thing, while the aircraft could apparently see everything, which used to cause no end of frustration. Cowden could do that to you. One minute it was all calm skies and open sea views, the next minute the place felt like it had disappeared into a wet white blanket.
Like anywhere, there were local characters too. We had a regular complainer, Mr Bentley of Cowden Parva Farm, who seemed to object to just about everything and was certainly no fan of the USAF. He became part of the background music of the place. Every posting seems to have somebody like that.
What I remember most now is not one single dramatic day. It is the overall feel of it. A tiny camp. Good food. Single rooms. Our own little bar. A handful of people keeping the place going. Civilian staff on the scopes and maintaining the targets, RAF air traffic control in the tower, and aircraft coming through in bursts of noise and energy before heading back out of sight. It was comfortable, but it was never soft. The tower could be nerve-racking. The sea could take half the cliff in a night. The range work had to be right. And despite the small size of the place, what we did fed directly back to front-line squadrons.
Cowden was a place of odd contrasts. It was peaceful and dangerous, comfortable and exposed, beautiful and unforgiving. One moment you could be enjoying one of the best mess meals of your service life, and the next you could be in a tower listening to rounds crack past or staring at a cliff edge that had moved alarmingly closer since yesterday.
I have been posted to bigger places, busier places and more important places on paper, but Cowden has stayed with me in a way many of them have not. Perhaps that is because it felt real. No pretence, no grandeur, just a small group of people doing an unusual job in a remarkable place.
One of my strongest childhood memories comes from living at No. 4 Trenchard Close, in the officers’ married quarters at RAF Aldergrove between 1968 and 1975.
Looking back now, it seems completely mad.
As kids, we used to crawl through the barbed wire and make our way over to the civil side of the airfield to watch the aircraft. Not from a sensible distance either. We would get right up to the edge of the runway.
We did it dozens of times and never thought much about it. To us it was just adventure. Aeroplanes, noise, excitement, and the simple thrill of getting away with something.
What makes it all the more extraordinary now is the setting.
This was not some quiet airfield. This was Aldergrove during the height of the Troubles. Security was tight. Police and soldiers were everywhere, carrying live weapons, and the situation across Northern Ireland was tense and dangerous.
But as children, we didn’t see any of that. We only saw the aircraft.
Eventually, our luck ran out.
One day we were caught. Thankfully it was the RAF Police who found us, not the Army. We were taken up to the tower for a proper bollocking, and no doubt we deserved every word of it.
But while the adults were focused on where we shouldn’t have been, something else was happening for me.
I was completely mesmerised by what was going on in that tower.
I can still picture it now. The view across the airfield. The constant movement. The radios. The calm voices controlling something that, to me, looked impossibly important.
I had gone up there in trouble, but the telling-off barely registered. I was far too busy taking it all in.
That moment never left me.
It’s one of those strange twists in life. A childhood escapade that could have ended very differently instead became the thing that pointed me towards my future.
I went into that tower as a boy who had been somewhere he shouldn’t have been, and came away with the first real glimpse of what I wanted my life to be about.
So when I look back on Aldergrove, I don’t just remember married quarters or the atmosphere of those years. I remember crawling through barbed wire, getting caught at last, and then standing in the very place that quietly set the course for the rest of my life.
I chose to fly to Saxa Vord. At the time, that felt like the easy option.
Train from King’s Lynn to Edinburgh first, dragging bags that seemed to get heavier by the mile. Then onto a small aircraft up to Tingwall in Shetland.
That’s where things started to shift.
As we descended, the landscape opened up beneath us. Jagged coastline, scattered islands, nothing like mainland Britain. Remote didn’t quite cover it. You could feel it before you even landed.
The second leg made it clearer. A tiny Islander across to Unst. Low enough to see everything. No hiding from where you were going.
Phil Taylor was waiting at the airstrip. No ceremony, just grabbed my bags and got me into the car. Within minutes I was introduced to island economics. He’d bought a Rover 3.5 the week before in a bar. Cost him a bottle of whisky. Apparently that was a fair deal.
We stopped at the Hagdale Lodge on the way back. That went exactly as you’d expect. By the time we left, judgement had taken a back seat.
Eventually we piled back into the car and set off along a single-track road at speeds that would have been questionable anywhere else.
Then, without warning, the bonnet flew open.
Instead of stopping, Phil simply ducked down and looked through the gap underneath it, still pressing on as if this was entirely normal.
There we were, newly arrived, half-cut, in a Rover bought for a bottle of whisky, being driven across Unst by a man navigating through a letterbox.
That was the moment it really landed.
This wasn’t just another RAF posting. The rules were different up here. Life ran on its own logic, and you either adapted or you didn’t last long.
Looking back, that journey north told me everything I needed to know. I just didn’t realise it at the time.
