1975, my second and last year as a dandy in the land of blue denim was one of the most eventful and purely joyous years of my late teens and early twenties. It was the year I went back to school, which is to say Brooklands, then a Technical College secreted within the semi-rural beauty of Weybridge in the furthermost reaches of suburban south west London, and where I enjoyed a very full and idyllically pleasant social life for nearly two years. My self-defence, guitar and swimming classes had long dried up, but I persisted with the private tuition, notably in Richmond with a charismatic Welsh Londoner, a musician as well as a teacher, called Michael G., who exerted a strong influence on me in terms of my already passionate interest in European literature; and specifically French and more and more thanks to Michael, Spanish literature. Michael was also complimentary about my writing style, encouraging me in a passion that was ultimately to career out of control so that I was unable to finish project after project due to my feverish cacoethes scribendi.
It also an exceptionally maritime year for me, and no sooner had one sea voyage finished than it seemed that I was setting sail again. The first of the lengthy series of sea trips that punctuated '75 was destination Amsterdam via Edinburgh and northern France on the square rigged training ship TS Churchill as part of the Sail Training Association. Among my shipmates were, apart from my 17 year old brother Dane, several young Scots and northerners, some youthful naval ratings, a handful of mates, those given direct responsibility over the rank and file of seafarers, and the Captain, a sleek and elegant Old Pangbournian. It was an all-male crew, and I was initially quite well-liked, but struggled to maintain my popularity. However, a southern lad with dark shoulder length hair like the young Jack Wild remained loyal to me as I recall after we'd bonded over an attempt at romancing two girls during a brief sojourn in France.
It was harsh sleeping in a spartan hammock, and being roused out of the same in the middle of a foul and blustery night in order to help trim the sails or something similar; that said, it should have been good for my character, and who knows perhaps in the final analysis it was.
Amsterdam was distinguished by the kind of flagrant fleshliness I'd witnessed the year before only worse in Hamburg. As for Edinburgh, there was a moment of tension when I entered a pub clad in a striped college-style blazer only to be greeted by a question on the part of a rough looking young man wearing a distinctly menacing smile along the lines of: "Y'all right, shun, are you frae Oxford then?". Somehow I am not certain quite how, I succeeded in talking my way out of trouble.

Within a few short weeks of our returning to London by train from Edinburgh, Dane and I were onboard ship again...this time a yacht which transported us to the Baltic coast of Denmark via Germany's famous Kiel Canal as part of the Ocean Youth Club; and once again we were supervised by mates or the equivalent. We wasted little time in recruiting a young man from Gloucester called Simon as our best friend, and soon after setting foot on Danish soil all three of us sought out the company of two classically Scandinavian blondes, which caused the Captain, who was a true character, warm, eccentric and funny, to remonstrate with us in a tongue in cheek manner about selfishly keeping our dates to ourselves; little could he have known how innocent our efforts at romance had in fact been. Less innocently perhaps, towards the end of the trip, while engaged in a fruitless pursuit of a German girl called Bettiner, whom I'd liked very much, and yet whom I senselessly forsook for the sake of a night's carousing with Dane and Simon before being overtaken by desperate regret, I lost my footing and fell fully clothed off some kind of pontoon or something into what were probably the waters of Kiel Canal, but whatever they were I ended the night a decidedly bedraggled jackadandy. One of the girls, for the ship's crew was mixed this time, helped me dry my clothes in the sun the following day, while another kind soul somehow procured me Bettiner's address; but of course she never wrote back, and I can't say I blame her...

Five weeks after we'd set sail, we were back in Albion, and I duly returned to Brooklands, and to the RNR...specifically HMS President the flagship of the London Division moored on the Thames Embankment near Temple undergound station. All London Division social activities took place onboard the President's sister ship the Chrysanthemum, and it was in '75 I think that I started romancing one of the Wrens; and such was her gentle sweetness of nature that when another Wren Brenda began showing an interest in me, she selflessly backed off even though it clearly upset her to do so. I remember Brenda and I attending a dinner dance together with another couple, close friends of Brenda's, at the Waldorf Hilton Hotel soon after "The Naked Civil Servant" featuring John Hurt had been shown on TV, and she became incensed when a couple of the older tars started teasing me in a light-hearted manner, before asserting that they only did so because they knew I was better than them. Of course I wasn't...but it was kind of her to say I was.