Hey Schimfer, you seem about my generation. *Do remember puttees and the way they used to rip any hacks on your fingers when you'd been in the field for a bit and you had to tuck the long trailing thingy in (unless you'd been to the tailoress and got them velcro'd of course)? Fookin' Shiite, Sah!!

On a positive note, I can positively recommend the Pinz Gauer as a mode of transport to you non-Air Assault chaps. *

10 man rat packs..whaaaaaaaa?

Love the sausages, tin of boiled sweets, bacon grill, but could well live without Cheese Possessed.

NO ONE likes the sausages. *This is because they are pasty, grey tubes of stuff squeezed in to a lard sheath. *I once fed them to seagulls on the Isle of Wight and was responsible for the death of thousands of birds through heart disease.

Boiled sweets? *Small sweet pieces of sand paper. *Bacon grill? *Not so bad I suppose. *

Enough tom foolery and back to my Torygraph. *Baahhh.

If we ' re talking rations it has to be dumplings and butterscotch sauce - revolting.

How many £1000s have been wasted by dumped boil in the bags?

It's all a matter of taste - when they're hot the dumplings in butterscotch sauce go down a treat, massive blood-sugar high. *But then, I'm strange, I don't like the instant oat cereal stuff.

AND I always thought puttees were kind of useful...they kept all the sh*te out of your DMS.

going back to '58 pattern webbing....

whose bloody idea was it to hook the backpack on in front of you then swing the f*@king thing over your head?????? removing your helmet and spraining your neck in the process i might add!!!!

AND where were you supposed to put your kit once your sleeping bag was in???????

Talking of bad rations, the latest trend of removing the cheese from certain ORP menus has me baffled. *I understand there must have been a problem with keeping cheese in storage for years before consuming but play fair. *A sticky label informing you 'Cheese removed' is fine, but replaced with what? *Bugger all. *Dry biscuit browns for lunch, good for morale.

I had to chuckle and I dont mean any offence when they brought out the ethnically correct ration menus. One of the Jewish menus was Lancashire Hot Pot how kosha is that????

yes indeed the 10 man rat pack was totally useles and caused a lot of grief sharing the choclate and bolies as there is never enough red ones

You can keep the boilies. *They're like sucking small pieces of extremely sweet sandpaper. *No match for cheese posessed, but pretty bad nonetheless.

As a sideline, there are apparently 2 varieties of cheese posessed, an orange one and a yellow one. *Both are impervious to heat and inedible, but one releases more goo when you try to cook it. *Handy stuff to hide behind in case of nuclear war though.