A wet Sunday at Castle Park (my prep school) was a dreary affair. If you think your schooldays were the best days of your life, I feel sorry for you. After two warm, sunny days at Garrhan the weather turned on Saturday night and it drizzled persistently all day yesterday.
The only similarity with a wet Sunday at CP writing a letter home is writing a blog, nursing a hangover and a gin and tonic. Johnny, an erudite classicist not averse to a G&T himself, says this is an example of zeugma, from the Ancient Greek, ζεῦγμα, meaning yoked together. Not something I learned at Eton or, if I did, have long forgotten. Now we must crack on.
You will have noticed how appropriate the title of my current book is. I am about a third of the way in and so far no idea why it’s called Rain. It is a first novel and, sorry Barney, not especially well-written but what it lacks in style it more than makes up for in content. The only similar book I have read is The Junior Officers’ Reading Club by Patrick Hennessey, describing his time in the Grenadiers serving in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Rain explores the relationships between a junior officer and his family, girlfriend, fellow officers, NCOs and troopers (Barney was in the Blues and Royals). He focuses on a six month posting to Afghanistan where he served in 2009/10. He vividly brings to life the psychological pressure of being a junior officer on active service. Particularly he brings out his fears and anxieties while putting on a mask of indifference to danger. It is fiction because it would have been too painful for him to write a memoir. The detailed descriptions of military routines are intensely absorbing. What Barney has done is to bring to life being a soldier in the 21st century as Patrick O’Brian conjured up sailors’ lives in the Napoleonic era.