CCF was compulsory at my school...
...only for one year though. After that one could branch out into the dizzying heights of "Community Service". Feeling that I'd rather be covered in good honest mud crawling through the woods, rather than horrible old person pee, I did RAF for 4 years.

I quite liked it; we got weekends away on the local army base (which coincided with TA training weekends...watching the semi-pros in all their serious action was rather amusing), were allowed to run through the market town where my school was based in camo gear, looking (as we thought at the time) very impressive and intimidating. We learnt how to fly, had lessons in how the planes worked, and were commended on being less gay than the Navy people and less stupid than the Army. And we got to crawl through shit.

Oh yes.
Shit.
Human excrement.

One day, we were doing our usual crawl through the woods around our school; it had been raining, so the paths had been mushed into a thick mud, of a porridge-like consistency. 100 yards in, someone remarked that it smelt a bit funny. 150 yards in, we all could smell it. 200 yards in, we realised where the smell was coming from: the broken drain. The "mud" was not pure! It was a foul mixture of wet earth, leaves, piss and faeces. And our NCOs just laughed, and made us crawl the next 200 yards to freedom and fresh air.

The worst thing was, our Matron refused to help us clean our uniforms. It was an exeat that weekend, and (my parents working overseas) I was staying with a friend in London. We had to take our shitty camo-gear from school (Northants) to Hampstead, on a crowded train and even more crowded tube, to get them cleaned by my friends mother.

At least we got seats to ourselves.
(The Empress it seems you CAN polish a turd!, Wed 29 Mar 2006, 10:54, Reply)