I nearly signed up. Here's why I didn't

WHERE I came from, you signed up, or you didn't.

If smart, you could have an education, or a job, or a custodial sentence, or a schoolboy form with a football club. Otherwise it was training with the standard British Army bayonet. It was what you did. That old, gone Scotland had its Jock-talk to make the process seem rational. "Away for a sojer," they'd say. The talk was feudal, mostly. Were you Edinburgh-born, in those days you went up to the Castle and signed up. I almost did.

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