HMS Invincible

During my former years, I was a short lived broadcast journalist. I did some cool stuff and even went to the Ivor Novello awards and got to interview Kylie, she was tiny.

But the best thing I ever did [and even now] was a two week placement with NATO, as a journalist for a war exercise they do annually. An embedded journalist, on HMS Invincible, a bloody great big aircraft carrier.

It was basically a big floating hotel, with awesome food, free [we forgot to pay at the end] booze, and free reign of the ship, but this hotel had armed guards and Harrier jump jets waking you up at 6am. But still, was bloody awesome.

The war exercise went well, we did our interviews and had a great time. However, by week 2, my girlfriend of the time, also a journalist, joined us on the ship. Sweet. More fun was had, lots of boozing [the Navy boys can drink – hell the pilots can fly the planes after a hard nights boozing] and one night, me and the girlfriend decided to spend the night, and hell, when are we going to get the chance to have sex on an aircraft carrier again?

Crept off to her bunk room, her room mate was out, so we did the deed, and passed out. Until we were woke by our media liaison officer [oh, we were also told we weren’t allowed to cohabit while on shit, Navy policies] the following morning. “Er, Mrs Stanley, is Stanley in there?” I decided to hide as I thought I’d be in trouble… “Well Mrs Stanley, we don’t mind if he is, just that we can’t find him and we may have to do a ‘man overboard’ which will mean stopping this 20,000 tonne vessel and sending out a search and rescue helicopter at a vast expense”… thought I’d better own up at that point. Still was worth it. Got to have sex on a Navy Warship while Harriers took above us… Awesome.
(CornishStanley can't post hyperlinks, Fri 24 Apr 2009, 10:14, Reply)