Preparations 3 - Visit to Northwood

I had rather forgotten how much I hate Northwood! At the moment the place is truly dreadful.
Arriving at night you are greeted with a wall of arc lights blinding progress in any direction. Behind the harsh lighting is a maze of massive building sites each surrounded by mud, building vehicles, miles of temporary metal fencing and an endless line of orange barriers and tape directing you in any direction other than where you need to go.
Since my last time up here they have opened the 'Visitors Centre', makes it sound like some historic sight on a holiday maker's tour of Britain. Far from it! It is possibly the largest police control building I have ever seen but is on the far side of the barrier at present so you are already in the establishment when they issue your pass. It is also the location of keys to the transit accommodation, though of course they don't tell you that until you have been to the other end of the site to discover for yourself that it is nothing at all to do with the Officer's Mess unlike the instruction given when booking the room in the first place. Oh, and there is no record of the booking with any of the duty staff; great.
And why am I here? To do a pointless and irrelevant briefing that starts at the ludicrously early time of 0800; which would be fine if the place was on the South Coast or even had a decent amount of accommodation on offer. I am not looking forward to this briefing already!

Preparations 2 - Gassing

One of many tedious aspects to going out to Bahrain is the need to get up to date in a whole load of areas which otherwise can happily be ignored.

Fortunately I am in date for my fitness test, had already booked a periodic health check and the dental check up was easy to fix.

One area that had been overlooked was the annual AGR (Anti-Gas Respirator or Gas Mask) check; er, this had actually been overlooked for about, ahem, 9 years! I was actually rather pleased I had remembered which bit of the garage roof the good old green bag was dangling from and glad to see that apart from a few spots of rust on the outside, a little bit of mold and quite a few cobwebs it was in quite good shape. There was some fear that I might find some fossilized remnant of an 'Action Snack' which I had been too busy to consume at the time and subsequently forgot about but fortunately there was nothing untoward in side.
Once I had found the NBCD training unit is was clear that this was all a bit out of date. So I gratefully handed over the ancient mess of an AGR that I brought with me and was issued a brand new one which now even comes with a camouflaged case. Only snag was that new AGR of course needs to be tested to make sure that it works and is the right size for ones face. This test incidentally no longer consists of being properly gassed with burning CS pellets but instead involves standing in a tent with a few candles and nodding your head – my times have changed. Actually, that was not the only snag as the second snag is that one can't get a seal and hence test the stupid gas mask if one has a beard – hence the recent re-exposure of chin to the world but at least I now know foolish AGR works if in the really very unlikely event of the worst coming to the worst and it is needed for real.

Preparations 1 - Gadgets

The whole going away to Bahrain business is not all bad I suppose. It has given me a sound excuse to top up on a few gadgets.

The first of these is the thing I am typing on now, a so called 'netbook' as it is smaller and lighter than a laptop and so supposedly ultra portable. This particular one is a thing called a Samsung NC10 which so far has proved very good indeed and has a phenomenal battery life which is always a rare thing. The only bit I was a unsure about was the small and slightly oddly shaped track pad but I have got around that by buying the world's smallest, sexiest and cleverest wireless mouse. It is about the same size as a lipstick tube and recharges itself by attaching itself to the wireless transmitter that plugs into a USB port on the computer. So far it works a treat and is impressively micro while still being entirely useable.

In terms of programmes I have loaded up Skype for VOIP chatting to all while I am away, Picassa for photo management and sharing via Picassa online site and then Open Office which is to all intents and purposes, Microsoft Office, except it is free, downloads quickly and installs with no problems at all (on second thoughts it is nothing like MS Office at all!).
The other gadget of which I am particularly proud is a new camera. A Sony Cyber-shot DSC-T2 to be precise and it is remarkably small (miniaturization is the way ahead when travelling!). It also has many more functions than I shall ever get to grips with but hopefully some of my efforts will be appearing here soon.

Assignment Order

Well, it has been on the cards for a few months now but I didn't think it was really going to happen! Having now had two Rear Admirals tell me that the job I am doing in the UK is considerably more important that a deployment I sort of thought that I might have at least been able to delay a deployment.

However, I am now in receipt of my assignment order to be the Deputy Staff Operations Officer to the UK Maritime Component Commander out in Manama, Bahrain for 6 months starting on the 16 Mar, ie just 4 weeks time. The job itself is both busy and interesting, is in a pleasant part of the world and with an very good infrastructure in that accommodation is in a decent hotel. It could of course be worse, ie Iraq or Afghanistan with people shooting at you, but equally it is not being at home and the deployment covers the hotest part of the year.

I'm still thinking about it all and don't really have a clear feeling one way or another. I would frankly rather not go for both personal and professional reasons but if it gets it out of the way and gives me longer in MWC I can cope with that. I am always sorry to disappoint Lucy and Sarah and they will be most affected by me being away but will reluctantly get on with it and put up with a rather unsatisfactory situation.

At the end of the day it is a classic life in a blue suit situation and once out there might even be quite fun for me at least. How it turns out will emerge on these pages.